Priorities
Fraggle Rocker said:
And also to their customers who will enjoy lower prices. And also to their suppliers who will enjoy higher prices. And also to their employees who will enjoy larger paychecks. And also to the charitable institutions they support who will enjoy larger contributions.
I would suggest that shareholders are supreme, though. Customers don't always recognize that they're enjoying the lower price, since overwhelmingly more often than not they see pricies rise. To the other, though, what are they supposed to see? It sounds like the Obama jobs argument—do we really want to know how bad it
could be? I'm not sure the customers would enjoy finding out.
Consumers are rarely amused by that sort of thing, you know.
However, one round of job cuts curtailing production in order to accommodate economic conditions while maintaining profit margins can hit the supplier, the employee, and the customer simultaneously. Charitable expenditure is always a viable cut to satisfy the shareholders. Wage freezes for the employees a company does actually keep reduce expenditures to the satisfaction of the shareholders. And so on, &c.
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BenTheMan said:
I would have answered this question the exact same way, but I am surprised to hear it from you.
Reality is as reality does.
Fraggle's idyll aside—although not discounting that those shiny-happy assertions of trade and finance do actually have some real effect—it all comes down to the philosophical presuppositions reflecting popular outcomes. Or, more directly, it's about priorities.
For all we hear about how trade creates jobs—a fact that could be taken to be self-evident if it wasn't beaten to death—the reality is that the operating presuppositions include that one can have their cake and eat it, too, but only
if you are rich enough. Yes, ambition is important to the human species. Nature is not extraneous. But our society depends for its prosperity on illusions designed to appeal to naked greed.
Nothing ever gets done until someone figures out how to make money. Ultimately, the very
ability to make money doing something rests with those who front the capital for the operation—e.g., the shareholders. The first priority, above all else, is making money.
As I see it, that's just how it goes.
The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism - are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.
But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim.
(Oscar Wilde)
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Notes:
Wilde, Oscar. The Sould of Man Under Socialism. 1891. Flag.Blackened.net. December 8, 2010. http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/wilde_soul.html