Confession Time: "I've lost my faith in Capitalism!" edition.

I think that I've heard on one of the conversations between George Johnson and John Horgan on bloggingheads, that someone had already the most expensive yacht ever, pimped to the extreme, but it was not enough, so the owner decided to revest the couches with skin of whale prepuce. I don't remember if it was real though, maybe they were just making up an example for what they were talking about, how sometimes (maybe a bit too often) people are never satisfied with a reasonable level of comfort, they must rise above others with meaningless (but necessarily expensive) status symbols.

I can't imagine myself ever doing these sorts of things. Buying a car that is more expensive than a reasonably good house, and this sort of thing. I picture I could have things even like a yacht, for the fun of sailing and all that, but at the same time I'd be somewhat like a"beverly hillbilly" in a way, not caring about status display and this sort of futilities. No dozens of different forks for all sorts of food, or glasses for different drinks for me.

Anyone mentioned "artist's sh*t yet?

I'm not sure socialism/statism is reasonable sort of "solution" for that "problem" though. I'm not sure about how much it's a problem anyway. Surely it would be better if all that money were spent on helping the poor, but 1-that would have to be done in a sustainable way, not just feeding them, not providing any mean or opportunity of making a living and family planning awareness, and 2-I don't feel very comfortable about that, I'm like those cartoons where the character has an angel and a devil version of himself whispering at his shoulders, but in my case there is a socialist and a libertarian at each side. Both have angel wings but also that red tail with a pointy end.

Maybe a reasonable "maximum wage" or something like that, maybe increasingly progressive taxes, at a level that anyone earning it would be deemed "rich" by 99% of people. But then there's the whole issue of trusting the government to do something that really works instead of being just a lazy bunch of bureaucrats living at the expense of others, possibly making things worse than they are without them. Which, somewhat ironically, maybe could be better dealt if democracy were somewhat "faster", if votes were somewhat more like money, so not only government would need to restrict itself for what "pays", but politicians would have to show better results, rather than having a somewhat guaranteed job for a few years, with the possibility of extending it for 4 more with some lame excuse and high investment on marketing fooling just enough people.

Damn it.

What does Capitalism have to do with the Fascist economic system of the U.S.?

For all those talking about how people inventing things that fill previously unknown (and unmet) needs, "Secret Asian Man" is doing an excellent riff on that now.

It probably hit home when I was examining a list of VHS titles and found ones in a series I really adored at the time. There was just one problem: I was in Europe at the time and the VHS tapes were incompatible with the VHS system used in America. The childish realization that this system totally sucks came home again later on with DVDs and video games, when I realized that titles which were perfectly accessible to me, either because I blatantly could understand the language they were in or because I could muddle through with a decent dictionary, and which I had a definite interest in playing were never the less inaccessible because some douchebags somewhere had decided that they wouldn't be able to make money on a movie title sold in the US if it had to compete with the same title sold overseas (and when DVDs in your country can't compete against something that costs that much to ship to your living address you know somethings wrong here).

From what I understand in VHS there was some mechanical reason for having a different regional standard, however the only reason for it in DVDs is to protect the companies that distribute media in different regions. Every freaking movie studio on the planet could start distributing region free DVDs tomorrow and not only would most of the people who just buy from their local video store or off Amazon.com not notice a difference, you'd actually get a slight increase in profits from people who want the title you're selling but the studios in their country haven't gotten around to selling.

I'm not sure we can blame the way most people seem to all make a concerted effort to follow whatever the current fashion is on capitalism, herd instinct is more likely (the more you look like all your neighbors the less easy it is to single you out from the herd). However I also can't say that capitalism doesn't exploit this to the largest possible extent. They're also exploiting the natural instinct to show off to rivals and potential mates.

The fact that a top executive can make hundreds of times more than someone who works his or her ass off, wearing themselves out before they hit fifty. The fact that the same executive can get away with anything with "we have a responsibility to our stock holders". The fact that most of the power today is in the hands of people who were never democratically elected.

Somewhere in the first half of my life (I'm 60), I came to understand that any institution spends most of its time serving its own survival, regardless of its founding principles and of how well the institution may serve its acolytes. I haven't done deep studies of history or psychology, and I can't point to a day that I came rushing home to announce my discovery of this eternal truth. I'm pretty sure that somewhere in my 20s, those studies I had done, plus my own observations, plus my father's skeptical views of the world, all came together into the understanding that business, government, religion, education, and people made most of their decisions with an eye toward extending their survival more than anything else.

This is not always a bad choice. After all, the decisions and principles that I thought of when I was 16 did not serve me well when I was 25. A business that employs 50 people in the making of buggy whips will probably fail to the disadvantage of itself and its 50 employees and their families if it does not figure out some valuable use for its services, once the demand for buggy whips fades away. And a government designed for the benefit of male landowners would do well to shift its focus when the landless and the laborer and women and the otherwise disenfranchised demand to be involved.

More often than I like to see, however, that urge to survival becomes exercised in trivialities, such as those mentioned in other posts. I remember a commercial for Shell Oil in the 1970s; the opening line was "I don't know much about oil, but I know deck shoes." Apparently, Shell had got into the manufacture of deck shoes, and the idea was that if they understood deck shoes, then they must know something about oil.

Not likely.

And once the whole industrial enterprise becomes engaged in the promotion of trivialities for enterprise survival, the focus on triviality becomes part of the culture.

I would say the same for the history of religion and of government, whether socialist or capitalist. The Soviet Union was the greatest violator of the principles of socialism, whereas the United States has actually incorporated some of those principles into its own governmental approach.

My belief is that we need to continually strive for balance. Capitalism can help socialism, and vice versa. This is where I think pre-literate societies have an advantage over those of us bound by the written word. When the tradition is passed along orally, it is adjusted according to the needs of the times. When it is set into writing, such as the bible or the constitution, you get people wanting to go back to an absolute interpretation of the document, sometimes centuries after it was written. That becomes more of an avoidance of difficult questions by ignoring the world as it is, whereas a balance between the spirit of the founding document and the actuality around us will lead us more clearly forward than strict adherence to something set eons ago.

I should probably go back to work.

Frank Moorman, skeptic
"what is the point of giving persons Freedom of Speech... if you then say they must not utilize same? And is not the Power of Speech the greatest Power of all? Then surely it must be exercised to the full." --Salman Rushdie