From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Aug 19 2001 - 12:25:04 MDT
Olga wrote
> I wish the store managers who stayed up nights thinking about how they could
> improve their supermarkets in order to beat the Safeway down the street
> would also come up with some ideas about how best to treat farmworkers.
>
> I wish the "immense concentration of knowledge [taking] place in the minds
> of a few people who have an enormous incentive to improve the quality of the
> stores" would also develop some incentive to improve the quality of people's
> lives - people who provide the basic foodstuff and products for their
> stores.
Well, as we say, "wishes don't make horses". What possible incentive
would anyone have to lie awake at night thinking of the best way to
treat farmworkers? Now, yes, it's easy to imagine "a man on horseback"
as a recent poster put it, or a "Stalin" whose heart would be in the
right place; but over and over we learn what happens when that approach
is tried.
I think that what is happening, Olga, is that you divine *your own*
motivations, and find them quite pure. I agree. I am certain that
you really do have the best interests of the farm workers in mind.
But you don't lie awake thinking of it at night. Instead, just like
the rest of us, you lie awake thinking of your own problems, and it
is a horrible mistake to think that a great leader will do any
differently. So all of his wonderful speeches about "benefitting
the people" are mainly power ploys to defeat his adversaries, gain
power from the (ignorant) crowds, and ultimately work towards his
own best interests.
> While supermarket customers' "body language, their shopping patterns, and
> most of all, their buying habits" may indeed be worthy of a specialized
> field of study, I'm afraid farmworkers' problems are all pretty much the
> same:
> http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/134331325_migrantkids19m.htm
Yes, their problems *are* just the same. And your problems remain yours,
and my problems remain mine.
> Nowhere is the need for children's programs more pressing than in this tiny
> town, population 2,609, where 96 percent of children live in poverty.
Here is the fatal urge. You read about some unfortunate situation such as this,
and you want to DO SOMETHING. (Of course, it's really none of your business;
you actually spend most of your time worrying about your own *local* problems.)
Hence even if it means for a great leader, or the government, to TAKE IMMEDIATE
ACTION BY SEIZING ALL ASSETS OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO HAVE MORE THAN THEY NEED, you
have an immediate sympathy for something, so long as it solves the problem.
Look at the words in that paragraph I snipped: the "need for children's programs",
"96 percent of the children live in poverty".
Well, all sorts of people everywhere in the world and all throughout history have
**needs**. We must not focus on the so-called causes of poverty, but rather focus
on how *anyone* ever escaped poverty. To find out how wealth is created in the
first place, one must start with Adam Smith, or any thinker who really tries to
get at root causes. Wealth was *never* created by taxing one sort of people and
benevolently bestowing it on those who have *needs* by means of "programs".
Lee
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