Commerce is peaceful. It involves sellers working hard and taking risks to bring to market goods and services that consumers want to buy. No one forces anyone to do anything; all is voluntary.
What truly is crass is politics - that sorry spectacle of power-seeking ego-maniacs who, when not pronouncing platitudes, are promising to help group A by picking the pockets of group B. While commerce is honest, politics is duplicitous. While commerce is peaceful, politics inevitably pits citizen against citizen. Far more enlightened and ethical behavior is on display during any one day in a shopping mall than the most intrepid observer will find in a century on Pennsylvania Avenue.
What truly is crass is politics - that sorry spectacle of power-seeking ego-maniacs who, when not pronouncing platitudes, are promising to help group A by picking the pockets of group B. While commerce is honest, politics is duplicitous. While commerce is peaceful, politics inevitably pits citizen against citizen. Far more enlightened and ethical behavior is on display during any one day in a shopping mall than the most intrepid observer will find in a century on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
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Nicely put. It recalls a famous passage from Voltaire's Philosophical Letters, in which he observes,
“Go into the Exchange in London, that place more venerable than many a court, and you will see representatives of all the nations assembled there for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the name of infidel for those who go bankrupt.”
As though in the real world you can in any way separate how commerce works and the underlining political and cultural presumptions that are ALWAYS dramatised in and via commerce and the "market".
ReplyDeleteAnd meanwhile where do all the shiny (cargo cult) consumer products come from?
The mega-malls being in effect the Cathedrals for the world-wide consumerist "religion". Where all the "faithful" go at the call of the advertisers to receive their "prasad" or shiny colourful object.
Whose blood sweat and tears were used to produce these shiny objects?
What cultures and eco-systems were, or are being, destroyed in this process?