Sg3 on 7/3/2011 at 03:17
I was checking a health insurance company's web site for something, and saw an unsubtle box that said, "Learn how to think and act like a consumer -- and feel confident in your decisions." Nope, not a joke. Learn how to think and act like a consumer? Isn't that what we've been doing for the last century or two at least, and are supposed to be reversing now? Argh! I mean I'm far from a tree-hugging vegan, and I know I'm preaching to the seminary here, but is it really necessary to encourage people in that direction? Never mind the morality of it; from a practical point of view, it seems completely redundant in the face of television. It smacks of yelling, "Faster!" to something that's already tumbling down a cliff.
mxleader on 7/3/2011 at 05:20
I'm surprised that they used the word "think" in the same sentence as the word "consumer."
Kolya on 7/3/2011 at 10:13
Link or it didn't happen.
Bobotsin on 8/3/2011 at 16:06
I tend to lean "chaotic neutral" myself as a consumer.
demagogue on 8/3/2011 at 21:02
What people need to do is learn how to be rational consumers.
Suggested rule: suspect almost anything a major for-profit company says is in your best interest.
Tocky on 10/3/2011 at 03:26
So a variable rate balloon note mortgage with banks that sell my paper as derrivatives that they then bet will fail in the market after they jack me up further beyond my already stretched ability to pay is not a good idea? Wow. But capitalism said it loved me. It bought me drinks all night and everything.
demagogue on 10/3/2011 at 04:14
I always thought capitalism was a strange bedfellow to many of its biggest advocates.
- Religious conservative folk & TeaBaggers love it, but it's rather anti-religious and has no patience for reverence. It's not warm to the old regime either. It's not the capitalists that want Mexican labor out of the US.
- Objectivists and Rand fanatics love it. But they're supposed to be rooting for human greatness over vapid mediocrity and weakness, and capitalism consistently panders to the latter at the expense of the former (one reason Rand's books struck me as contradictory practically on their face).
- Libertarians love it, but it's not at all particularly friendly to laissez-faire.
- Big business claims to love it, but often seem to get captured by perverse incentives to do rather anti-capitalist things... like screw their stockholders over for shortterm gain at the expense of longterm growth, or feed an irrational overheated bubble economy until it pops and everybody's screwed.
A few fresh water economists are about the only people around that still love it for the right reasons.
