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Re: Whoa up there, Dan!
In article <19961219.075002.6598.6.woodyw@juno.com> woodyw@juno.com
(Woody Wodraska) writes:
>What's wrong with capitalism is that the blind pursuit of profit as the
>only good--what I call the corporate mentality--to the exclusion of other
>goods such as life, harmony with Nature, understanding, right livlihood,
>*requires* the application of linear/industrial thinking to living
>systems in agriculture, as I wrote earlier.
Capitalism, like every other economic or governmental system, has no
intrinsic personal values. In capitalism, personal values are
expressed by the consumer, who chooses what he wants to buy.
Whatever it is that people want to buy will appear in the
marketplace, if such products are at all possible (this is Smith's
"invisible hand"), because someone will want to make money off
serving the consumer's desire. Values have real power only at
the consumer level anyway. You can't gain central control of
the people's souls.
>Nature operates in cycles,
>not in straight lines, and such an industrial approach (e.g., weaner pigs
>or day-old chicks go in one end of a confinement facility, consume tons
>of imported, medicated, hormone-laced feed and come out the other end
>ready for slaughter) is doomed to failure in the long run. If we base
>our being "better off" on such practices, we too are doomed.
These practices exist because the consumers care more about low
price, uniformity, and convenience than they do about flavor,
humane raising practices, and chemicals.
There are only three things that can be done about this:
1. Ignore it.
2. Attempt to change the consumer's preferences through marketing (some
people don't like to call it marketing, so they call it "education").
This is my approach: making converts and sales one at a time. Hand-
crafted progress.
3. Try to impose your own values through regulation. In essence, this
denies that the consumer should be able to make a free choice, which
in turn is a bald statement of paternalistic elitism. (I find this
whole concept to be highly immoral.)
-- Robert
--
Robert Plamondon, High-Tech Technical Writing, Inc.
36475 Norton Creek Road * Blodgett * Oregon * 97326
robert@plamondon.com * (541) 453-5841 * Fax: (541) 453-4139
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