Quote Originally Posted by IowaSkinsFan
This is absolutely not true. In this Bounty situation, if you think that best interest means paying the least amount of money, your both limited in your scope of what money is but also wrong. Lets say people did not want to purchase paper towels from a producer who paid executives high salaries. They wanted their salaries lowered x amount. They decide to boycott paper towels from Bounty until they lower the executives salaries. Now lets say this is 30 million peoples values, and they all boycott Bounty. One of Two things (maybe others?) will happen: 1. Another paper towel company will come along with low executive salaries and take all the customers. 2. Bounty will lower their executive pay and keep their business. This is what the economy is all about. People offer you goods and services that you want. If enough people want a certain kind of good or service, it will be offered. If enough people want a paper towel company that has low executive pay, it will be offered because a profit can be made.
I'ma stay out of this in general ‘cause I’m long-winded as f-k…

But there’s a couple of interesting nuggets bought up in this excerpt alone that are fun to noodle, so I will noodle.

1. The “market gets what it demands” concept is at the root of a pure free market. It’s also used to let people or entities abdicate any responsibility for what they produce and how they do it. Of course, pure free markets do not exist, nor have they ever. So the interesting piece here is whether this truly works in an adulterated state? Do people truly get the government they deserve? Should we as a culture produce whatever crap we can possible think of, and see if there are enough people who want to vote with their wallets? Should Walmart or any other organization be allowed to pursue price reduction at all costs ‘cause, well, we sure likes us some cheap sh!t? Should we mainstream porn or violence in entertainment ‘cause there are enough people willing to pay for it? Who the hell knows, and it’s a moving target. All I know is that here was a time when we sure loved us some gladiators and Christian-eating lions…

2. Which leads to the next curiosity… how does limited information and bias affect our personal implementation of “good”? Maybe Bounty payers higher executive salaries overall, and demands more of their employees accordingly? Maybe Bounties executives take on more exposure to operational risk than other organizations do? The list of unknown, bias-free variables is long. I personally think it’s insane that we pay Union Longshoremen $100K+ to move boxes around a dock. Or $60K+ with guaranteed pensions to minimally educated autoworkers assembling cars in Detroit. I’m sure they all disagree with me. And so I can choose to buy a foreign car manufactured ex-US, exposing myself to a whole other laundry list of hidden material facts.

3. Then finally… who says my definition of “good” is better than yours? I can guarantee you it’s different, and values I hold are guaranteed to compete in a zero sum game on a whole host of levels. Overly simplistic examples… I think we should tax the sh!t out of gas and that money should only be used to offset the true cost of long-term environmental consequences, not leaked away to subsidize preschools, healthcare, grandma’s retirement or Uncle Joe’s family farm. You may think that represents a horrendous burden on the economy, and the pain of job loss and reduced buying power is far worse than some yet distant environmental hokum pokum. I think abortion is a complex issue with ethics and science that are still opaque so opt for leaving the decision to the individual. Dude on the corner believes that our understanding of when life begins (or ends) will continue to evolve, and sometime in the not too distant future we’ll realize that abortion is equivalent to infanticide and should therefore treat them the same today (by not permitting either). And there’s a million other examples.

I guess my two main points are a) I’m not a really all that convinced that the madness of crowds is going to lead us to the second coming of good and b) we’re most likely going to demand centralized organizing structures (family, tribal, religious, political, community, whatever) as the power model to project our preferred balance of self gain and that of the broader system. The fact that these things are always in conflict (and will always be…) is why we have yet to find a utopian system that keeps everyone happy on a global scale.

And why we frequently devolve into not much more than a bunch of monkeys indiscriminately tossing our poo…