Digital Polemic: Free Market?
Original Message
From: RK
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 10:48 AM
To: MD
Subject: free market?
MD,
how can you fully defend the virtues of your free market in light of this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/18/health/18RESI.html
[If this article is no longer available at the New York Times web site, click here for an archived copy of the article.]
and please try to keep your response on topic... the more you digress into the "futility of postmodern nihilism", and the "failure of marxist ideology", the more your arguments become watered down with your own alternate one-size-fits-all utopian agenda. and *please* try to refrain from suggesting that we're all better off with our abundant food supply [this will make sense when your read the article above] and that a little anti-biotic resistant meat is the price we pay for our "success" in food production... i know it will be difficult, but please, in all sincerity, help me to understand how corporations can be defended *at all* in light of the above.
Original Message
From: MD
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 12:08 PM
To: RK
Subject: RE: free market?
Fortunately, I have no password to the website of the NYT - that bastion of Upper West Side Liberal Elitism, that is, the folks who want more taxes because they can afford it. So this leaves me only to speculate about the article to which you refer.
And much as I appreciate your new tactic of baiting the me into ideological combat through patronization, I must simply, and without emotional excess (the plague of all self-righteous utopians, with yourself as exhibit 'A') but rather with cold, cool, analytical reason, (which our Forefathers in their infinite wisdom, chose to guide them in affairs of Statecraft) suggest that corporations, as organizations dedicated to Profit, paradoxically create far more jobs, wealth and well-being than organizations dedicated to some Utopian Ideal. (who puts more food on tables in Sri Lanka - Nike or Greenpeace?)
Though far from perfect, these global corporations are simply better than any other organizations (that operate in the real world) at creating wealth. Wrong! scream the Liberals (in their Nike Hiking Boots) Exploitation of the Workers! Perhaps. But at least Nike doesn't operate prison camps for political dissenters, as your Utopian Socialist Alternative would necessarily have to. Lets see...what else on your tired Laundry List of Anti- Capitalism....oh yes - frankenfood, bio-engineering of crops.
This is perhaps one of liberalism's (lower-case 'l'- true Liberalism is a 18thC Free- Enterprise Ideology) more perverse hypocrisies. Do you know that through bio-engineering, a strain of super-rice has been created that feeds unprecedented numbers of people with no significant increase in time, energy or financial resources? Do you think that whichever Evil, Earnings-Driven Bio-Company created this rice because they care about World Hunger? (You probably do - your naive faith in the goodness of people is at the root of your political delusions). Wrong. Profits, pure and simple.
'Profits and Paradox: The Quiet Altruism of Capitalism' That should be my next project...
Original Message
From: RK
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 2:46 PM
To: MD
Subject: free market?
ahhhh... the nyt... but please acknowledge that it is better to want more taxes because you *can* afford it, than *not* want new taxes even though you know you *can* afford it. there is nothing worse in this world than a feeling that your own personal manifest destiny is somehow disassociated from the humanity of other people with which you share not only common genetics but common fears - which you repress with the belief that your ideology is the only one that is reasonable [nascent utopianism again], and it is far superior than those of us who believe that the contextual value of things changes over time [of course when i say "you" i mean not you but those who share the sad mentality described above].
my god, you must be churning in your own bile by now... contextual values! damn! pagans, all of them! how can they not see the beautiful truth that economic prosperity is much more important than human enlightenment... damn! economic prosperity is human enlightenment! doesn't everybody know that?!? ohhh... silly me... i forgot... how awful things would be if the free market were derailed... the "human enlightenment" i speak of would be extinguished by famine and war and disease, all fought relentlessly against by a free market [which you correctly state does *not* have any interest in saving humans at all... its about the bottom line: although a romantic, i fully acknowledge this fact - a sure sign of my latent republicanism you might think... but you'd be wrong].
and i must go on, painful as it is to continue to point out the obvious... as far as your "cold, cool, analytical reason", your modernist roots are starting to buckle the sidewalk... be careful, as you may trip yourself up on the heaving concrete pavers. your rationality is as thinly veiled as is my latent marxism [if you insist on calling it that]... for what good is this rationality to art and love? surely these things have some importance in your valueless market-driven universe? or should we let the corporations supply us with mass-produced picassos and michelangelos? michael graves is doing it at target, and see how much everyone likes it? yes, they all like it, they all want it... i'm silly again aren't i! they love it! give it to them so that they can support the earn/spend cycle that creates what you revere as a "rich" society! yea! we're all rich! all of us except those that aren't big fat and white! but i digress... this earn/spend cycle and the rationalization of the "cold, cool, [cruel]" world make art and beauty and love things you can buy at the shopping mall... what the hell do we need revolutionary genius for... to hell with jesus, and gallileo, and copernicus [all got fucked for preaching unpopular anti-establishment rhetoric... but where would we be without them?].
this rich [monetary] society is contributing to the ugly mono-culture of mass-consumerism which even *you* detest... that you can't see that the policies you support are evil and wicked and represent nothing more than the policies of scared elitists [and here we are talking about conservative elitists] hoarding money and power in the same way that the saudis hoard money and power. its just that our society looks free [in a relative sense, i agree that it is]. but that it *is* free in a relative sense does not mask its true nature...
your automatic retort of "okay, what's the alternative" leaves me with no other choice now: the alternative is knowing that this system will undergo change. and that some of this change is good, and some is bad, and it will all be pitched as "good for america and the rest of the free world" under the hidden agenda of making a few people rich and powerful. this is the nature of things. and so here it is... and i apologize ahead of time, but i can't hold it back any longer:
we need a separation of economics and state.
just as church and state are now separated... and no, this isn't a romantic idea any more than it was a romantic idea to separate church from state in the 17th century at a time when kings and theocracies were the norm through *all* of the world. we must strive for this separation of humans are to develop their nascent genius... which *all* people have. the guy begging for food, the girl working the fast food counter, and even the son of a white collar family from the suburbs of new york city, who now is an architect working in nyc. all alive and breathing and capable of living beautiful lives. and if we do this right, they just might get it. each one... instead of suffering the humiliation of being told that to be "successful" they must learn how to excel in a system which even i, in my infinite genius have begun to doubt in its very essence.
with art, life, and love,
RK