quote:
Originally posted by Kinboat:
Didn't upset me, I personally agree with you here. One symptom of the current system is seeing people more as consumers instead of producers. Unemployment is a prime example... When in an agrarian society would there be unemployment? There wouldn't be much because everyone has their own land farming for their own food. It's only when you get into mass-production that you start making so much junk you don't need more producers, just more consumers. Unemployment and social castes (rich, richer, and poor) result. Don't know if I even understand that one sentence. Anyway I'd just like to say, excellent arguments all around.
Whereas the emphasis on conspicuous consumption as a mark of success has, IMO, helped to eliminate the general health of the family institution, consumption itself also drives the push for technology.
Make no mistake, returning to an agrarian society of gentlemen farmers would not be a turn in the right direction. It's one thing to keep a family plot to augment your caloric intake, quite another to farm for a living in this day and age (unless you're Amish). No unemployment? How about starvation or losing your farm when there's too little or not enough rain. Can anyone say "sharecropper", or worse yet, "serf". Not too many true Jeffersonians left, except for the re-enactors.
On the contrary, it's mass production and the economies of scale that have made this hemisphere the breadbasket of the world.
Social castes will always exist to an extent or other because not all people are cut from the same cloth. Unlike what a Socialism Purist would have you believe, Capitalism, or the hybrid of Capitalism and Socialism that we labor under exists as a hybrid because purism requires another "ism" for it to work: fanaticism. For the average Joe/Jane busy going about their lives seeking to better their lot in life and that of their kin, capitalism, with it's emphasis on incentive and reward is more attractive than socialism and it's attention to the lowest common denominator which rewards stagnation and sloth.
Sorry for the rant.
[ 08 April 2002: Message edited by: wr8th ]
Re: OT: Our Economy (US)
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