[MD] Flying Spaghetti Monsters

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Craig]
That's the point.  In a free market transaction, the participants act in a way
beneficial to both parties.

[Arlo]
Not necessarily. The market is only as good as the dominant metaphysical, or
discourse, underlying it. In ZMM Pirsig made the explicit point that the
production and consumption of goods was flawed by SOMist approaches to both. I
would argue that the problems so described have not waned since ZMM. While in
ZMM, Pirsig talks about how a Quality-based metaphysics would alleviate these
problems, I've likened this to the pervasive mercantilistic discourse that has
become the foundational language of the West since the Industrial Revolution.
What we've done, effectively, is replace an aristocracy with a capistocracy,
where "money is the measure of all things". Human beings are reduced to
"headcount" or "expendible resources", we fuel the consumerist machine by a
psyche that needs to buy, to demonstrate wealth, in order to feel satisfied.
Publications like The Journal of Consumer Psychology demonstrate covert and
other stealthlike ways a producer can make you NEED his/her product, even after
you've made the decision it is not something you want. Vendors of cheap goods
(you know who they are) promote crap and poorly made goods as "saving you
money", when the reality is in the long run people pay MORE for these goods.
Harken back the 1890's, prior to the great "socialism" that has attacked our
country, we're people really better off? No welfare. No unemployment. No
liability. Would you have wanted to work for Pullman? Or in any of the vast
sweatshops that had sprung up? My grandfather came from a family of miners near
Llewlyn, PA. He told me many times how as a child he'd watch the "company men"
drop off a dead miner's body at the door to his "shack", as if he was a dead
cow, or worse, as if he were "nothing". The family, with no source of income,
would lose their "shack", and likely the mother would end up sewing in a
factory for 15 hours a day, earning barely enough to feed her kids, let alone
"acquire wealth". For every story of success, there are hundreds if not
thousands of people that were abused to no end. And so we enacted those great
socialist programs, not out of "evil", but as a recognized protection against
the realities of the "free market" without them. Now, while I find it of much
greater value spreading the MOQ word, a la interim I find it also of value to
remind people of the "commoditiy status" that mercantile discourse has reduced
them to.