James Cumes writes:
"As Lasch writes, the rampant market puts
an almost irresistible pressure on every
activity to justify itself in the only terms
it
recognises: to become a
business
proposition, to pay its own way, to show
black ink on the bottom line.
"It turns news into entertainment,
scholarship
into professional careerism,
social work
into the scientific management of poverty.
"Inexorably, it remodels every institution in
its own image."
=== end Cumes == begin Gelles'
rejoinder ===
"Careerism" caught my eye. It was the
sin
of socialism more than of the free
market
as we know it. In fact the above could
be
restated as follows:
Rampant Socialism forces all
to fit a
rigid model of class distinction. It turns
news into propaganda,
scholarship
and politics and all
professions into
careerism, social work into
police work.
Inexorably, it squeezes out of our
middle
class sentimentality whatever
sweetness
civilization has allowed.
I know no addressee above would
defend rampant
socialism -- although
they migh replace
rampant with
totalitarian.
And I have not followed this thread
from its beginning; but if
we are justifying
inequality on grounds that it can
be
benign, I would think the
justification
is self
evident:
At the
very, least we will always have
to award the extras in life to those
who
receive them
first while others wait in
line.
Today those who come first
are
chosen by their skill at making
money.
Admittedly we could clean up the
game
where that skill is employed.
Pure equality would
require a lotterty
to decide who comes first,
second,
etc.
It is self-evident that a
lottery to
replace a contest is not a sure bet
to
improve all that is wrong with
us.
Nor, I must admit,
has the contest
we call free enterprise been well
enough structured to ease
suffering
or erase homelessness, poverty
or
filth, the way we wish it would.
I see no other course for any of us
but
to keep trying.
Although extreme love of self over others
may be a disease
whose cure is a long
way off, one
institution we could change
now is taxation.
We could substitute saving for it.
This would invite extreme inequality to
coexist, perhaps even to
produce,
an absolute end of poverty.
The game of business for profit might
be structured to
pay off for those who
produced the means to end poverty,
pollution and war.
If you say "business", per se,
produces
poverty, pollution and war, I
answer,
"so does socialism". And we are
back
at square one.
John Gelles