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Barack Obama  |
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Rob Kailey is a working schmuck with no ties or affiliations to any governmental or political organizations, save those of sympathy.
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Sun Jul 01, 2007 at 20:37:55 PM MST
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| Chair of the University of Montana Economics department, Thomas Power, recently wrote an op-ed for KUFM that neatly explains the point I was trying to make earlier this weekend about the futility of relying on a massive and impersonal market for any kind of economic justness:
Democracy, freedom, and prosperity, we are told, demand the acceptance of whatever outcomes business decisions and markets deliver to us. It is then our job, individually, to cope as best we can with whatever set of forces are unleashed on us. The challenge of that constant change and our struggles to adapt to it will be the creative force driving our social evolution forward in a positive and rational direction. Of course, as with natural selection and the survival of the fittest, many of us will fail, suffer, and, even, die. But that is necessary for the ongoing evolution of the larger society.
This, of course, is poppy cock. In the name of "freedom" it empowers large collective bureaucratic organization called corporations to amass wealth and power that allows them to exercise considerable control over our political, social, and economic evolution. Meanwhile we are told that we have to respond as isolated individuals. We are not to organize ourselves collectively to try to control our destinies or, even, to try to protect ourselves against the damage being done to the natural world and the communities that we in habit.
Markets and corporations are human institutions. They are tools designed to help us accomplish certain things. There have always been customs, laws, and regulations that set the sideboards, enforced commitments, and encouraged honesty within commercial institutions. Without those neither markets nor complex business organizations would be possible. It is human purpose that brought them into existence and continues to guide them. It can be no other way. In that sense it is and always will be we citizens who have to judge the rationality and attractiveness of the outcomes and modify the rules and regulations when the outcomes are unacceptable to us.
Anything else empowers the corporate adventurists to manipulate the world to pursue their vision of the profit potentials available while condemning the rest of us to fatalistically cope as best we can. That outcome has nothing to do with freedom, democracy, or prosperity.
Amen.
(Hat tip to Jackie Corr.) |
| Jay Stevens :: UM's Thomas Power on prosperity and democracy |
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