The Free Market Problem

Paul Ryan and his supporters are trying to sell their spending cut and lower tax program and they’re getting booed at town hall meetings.  They’re finally cutting into people’s pockets who can’t defend themselves.  They thought they were doing what their constituency wanted and must be baffled at this negative response. Okay, this might get a bit complicated, but not really.  It just requires a shift in perspective away from the definition of capitalism we’ve been being sold since Reagan to something that is more descriptive of what actually happens.  Theory is all well and good and can be very useful in specific instances, but a one-size-fits-all approach to something as basic as resources is destined to fail. Oh, I’m sorry, let me back up a sec there—fail if your stated goal is to float all boats, to raise the general standard of living, to provide jobs and resources sufficient to sustain a viable community at a decent level.  If, on the other hand, your goal is to feed a machine that generates larger and larger bank accounts for fewer and fewer people at the expense of communities, then by all means keep doing what we’ve been doing. Here’s the basic problem.  People think that the free market and capitalism are one and the same thing.  They are not.  THEY ARE CLOSELY RELATED and both thrive in the presence of the other, but they are not the same thing. But before all that we have to understand one thing---there is no such thing as a Free Market.  None.  Someone always dominates it, controls it, and usually to the detriment of someone else. How is it a free market when one of the most salient features of it is the ability of a small group to determine who will be allowed to participate and at what level?  I’m not talking about the government here, I’m talking about big business, which as standard practice does all it can to eliminate competitors through any means it can get away with and that includes market manipulations that can devalue smaller companies and make them ripe for take-over or force them into bankruptcy.

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Beware Little Brother

Paranoia waxes and wanes in this country, but let's set aside the propensity for some media personalities of late to fan the "they're out to get you" flames. Even with the ubiquitous presence of Youtube videos from cell phone cameras and more heightening the sensitivity of everyone not a celebrity to the truth that someone is always watching, I'll submit that few are aware of this surreptitious encroachment on our privacy... Eva Galperin, at the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in a commentary entitled "What is Traitorware?":

Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera's serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy patent it has recently applied for into use, you can look forward to a day when your iPhone may record your voice, take a picture of your location, record your heartbeat, and send that information back to the mothership.
I am a dinosaur when it comes to coding. I used to be able to reverse engineer programs to figure out how they worked - for fun or to learn a neat method, not for malicious purposes; it's like taking apart a laser pointer or a DVD player...just a curiosity. But today's software and hardware have too many hooks into other libraries, chips and Skynets. I have an iPhone to which I accede an agreement to 47+ pages of terms in order to use the only resource for loading applications (that would be the ever frustratingly inept coding known as iTunes) unless I want to jailbreak it. Uh, not today. And for that, plus my microwave, camera, and who knows what else, I yield my privacy.

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Looking for Jesus at Christmas

Because Christmas is quickly approaching, I decided to start looking for Jesus in the easiest places to find large numbers of people: big box stores. More specifically, I'm looking for large images of Jesus, not thumb-sized Jesus Babies tucked away in a little mangers. I started my hunt at Lowe's two days ago. I found huge Santas, reindeer, snowmen, elves, penguins wearing hats and fashion-model angels, but no Jesus. How odd, that when a celebration is supposedly only about Jesus, you won't find any prominent images of Jesus. You'd expect to see huge inflatable images of Jesus on the roofs of the stores and on their parking lots. You'd expect to find life-sized Jesus images on people lawns. You'd expect to see large statues of bloodied Jesuses on crosses, his alleged moment of glory. But, except for those little Jesus babies you might find in an occasional manger kit, that doesn't really feature him, you won't find Jesus, even though he is the purported reason for all the fuss. Nor will you find stores promoting his alleged teachings. Such strange compartmentalization. Why is it that we don't see a life sized Jesus statue trying to get us to buy that new iPod? Or a Jesus image urging us to buy a life-sized Santa? Apparently, the image of Jesus doesn't sell plastic goods and gadgets. Is that because Jesus is never alleged to have said anything about going into debt by buying lots of consumer goods. Is it because it would be tasteless to buy all of this crap with the image of the alleged creator of the universe, the man who allowed himself to be tortured to save your eternal life, staring at you? Or is it because we don't really believe the things we say about Jesus, and that we actually don't believe in Jesus, but we only believe in belief?

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