[MD] Are we the people stupid?

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Khaled wrote]
Oh but this is a free market and Platt will argue that we should not interfere
in it and we should charge what the market will bear.? I agree with that. The
only thing I ask for is to tell the people the TRUTH as to why gas is $4 a
gallon and show us really where the money is going.

[Arlo]
Is it a market if there is no competition? If my local dairy farm has an
outbreak of cow-violence and raises it prices from $2/gallon to $4/gallon, I as
a consumer have a choice. Support the dairy farm by paying the higher prices,
or purchase my milk from the dairy farm over the hill which is still charging
only $2/gallon.

Even Bill O'Reilly has been blasting the profiteering of the oil companies. But
its hard to do with a language that says simply, "profit is all that matters".
A "free market" is only as good as the cultural values on which it sits, and
when those values are fed by an SOMist worldview, including the mercantilistic
language of profit over people, you get a market concerned with, as David M
just put it...

"The problem being that these values are not intellectual, they are biological,
consumerist, selling sex, entertainment, distraction, uneducated pleasure,
unhealthy food, style over substance, social status, etc. So the dynamism
simply reinforces are current devolution."

In ZMM, Pirsig describes a malady that came about due to the SOMist
underpinnings of culture in both the production and consumption of goods. His
weariness the "grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the manners that will
convince themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style and
glamour vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid for by the
vendors of substance" continues to this day. It would, of course, since I doubt
the SOMist underpinnings of our culture have been removed.

Arlo