Wednesday 21 August 2002

uh oh, I feel a rant coming...

The sick thing about all this is that of all of the crap that we ingest, the worst stuff is the additives and stuff put in by the companies like Lever who have such a complete monopoly that they can do anything they like! They try to brainwash us (and a lot of times succeed!) into thinking that if we buy product X, Y or Z it's going to make us better looking, more sexy, healthier, richer or some other damn thing! Companies get more and more rights and we humans get less. Our "elected" political "representatives" are all beholden to their rich backers and no-one else.

They couch it up in terms that make it seem like the whole thing will benefit the rest of us; "trickle-down economics", "wealth-creation", "market liberalisation". The reason Adam Smith called the hand "invisible" was because IT DOESN'T, DIDN'T AND CAN'T EXIST it was a theory based on the idea that in a society where there was PERFECT INFORMATION the market would function to regulate itself. That simple term "perfect information" negates -to a large extent- the whole theory! Why? Because there is no such thing as "perfect", it's an entirely ethereal concept that was taken seriously when the human race was even more self-assuradly arrogant than it is now. You can't assume that everyone knows everything, especially not in a society where the majority of the population are so inured and distracted by trinkets and meaningless nonsense that they may as well be duracell batteries! But still the thrust of "modern" economics pushes us towards ever greater exploitation and abuse, and couches it in terms of "development" or "progress".

The problem is not individuals, if any of us were offered the kind of money David Beckham is offered, would we say no? I don't think so! The problem is not that he says yes or no, the problem is the culture that we all exist it which says that it's ok for one person in society to live in squalour on £20 a week, while 20 miles up the road lives another individual who gives spending a monkey no more thought than they would to wiping their arse! And they wonder why 14 year old kids are getting addicted to heroine...?