Say a farmer grows 60 koku of rice, enough to feed 60 people for a year. He withholds 10 koku for seed and 10 koku for his family. He has 40 koku of rice. A businessman stops fellating chickens long enough to make an offer for the 40 koku: 500 yen for the lot. The farmer, knowing how much sake that can buy, agrees. So the businessman hires a shipper, for 10 yen, to take the rice to market. He sells the lot for 1000 yen. What has happened here? A product, worth 510 yen, has been sold for twice that. The businessman pockets 490 yen, for doing nothing more than taking advantage of his clients. Business is all about taking advantage of people, and the more, the better. Make people buy things they don’t need, create new needs and impetuses for consumption, and force-feed the lard-asses of the ‘service’ economy the products of human sweat and blood. If you don’t make something, create something new, you’re shit and you can only try to hide it. Confucius was right to denigrate commerce, it’s about predators in human skin, animals that know nothing better than to feast on their fellows. Businessmen create nothing by themselves. They just steal from others. Snack food. Do you need snack food? No. Is a little snack food okay? Sure. Is cramming 6000 calories of sugar a day on children and adults alike, just so you can make a quick buck, okay? No. The whole fucking snack food industry is based around force-feeding processed pigwaste to people too fat and stupid and empty to know the difference. Your average trailer-park resident, working at a fast-food joint, watching his 500 channels of uninterrupted advertising and crass consumerism, doesn’t know the difference between intellectual satiation and physical satiation. He’s never going to be a pro football player, rap star, or actor, and he doesn’t know any other way to make his empty little shithole of a life bearable but to force more poison-flavored eXtreme SOOPERSNAKKZ (now with 9 times the MAXIMUM CHEESE-LIKE FOOD PRODUCT FLAVOR APPROXIMATION! and half the rat droppings) down his mushy gullet while his wife buys faux-sentimentality in the form of ceramic angels and idyllic scenes of children (while ignoring her own budding little consumers) from a televised shopping network. Maybe the motherfuckers don’t deserve to be saved from their own fucking advertising-fabricated desires. Fuck it. At least in Soviet Russia, it was just the government trying to kill you. In the United States, we’ve institutionalized the idea that success can only come at the expense of someone else, through business. Even the smarter among us use their intelligence to become entrepreneurs, raping their community, gouging them, milking them dry, all in the attempt to become so obscenely bloated that they force their rapacious, blood-stained fingers around the neck of the entire global economy and squeeze until the sweet stuff comes out. Blood drinkers and marrow eaters, people who live off the sweat of billions, when millions get caught in the gears of their machinations every year. It doesn’t matter. The profits keep flowing in on a tide of blood, and the worthless sacks of pus keep swelling.
I’d just like to commend you on the mighty size of your paragraph. Bravo, sir.
This sounds like too much of a generalization for my tastes. How many of the people on this board can be considered part of “the smarter among us,” yet do NOT rape the community?
Other than that, I appreciate your opinion. And your fine ranting style.
Hi welcome to life, enjoy your stay!
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And here I thought business/commerce was about trading something you have for something you want. In this case the businessman wanted the rice that the farmer grew. The farmer wanted the yen that the businessman had. So they made an amicable trade that satisfied both parties. DAMN but I love it when a plan comes together.
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I have a lot of crap I don’t need. But you know what? I really enjoy spending my money on DVDs and models because I enjoy those things.
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So who is shit? I’d like to know.
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Isn’t Confucius shit? All he did was sit around on his fat ass all day taking advantage of poor farmers and artisans. Of course we’ll ignore the fact that commerce helped China grow into a huge empire with fantastic philosophy and art. Without commerce there would not have been a Confucius.
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They do? And here I thought they simply bought stuff that people wanted to sell. And you know what? Some businessmen open stores and other business ventures.
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How is being an entrepreneur raping your community? What about all those Korean store owners on the west coast? Are they raping their community?
You’re full of shit. But that ok I won’t hold it against you. Commerce is good. You wouldn’t have computer, health care, or many other nice things if it weren’t for commerce. Hell, civilization itself probably wouldn’t have gotten far if it weren’t for commerce. But go ahead and bitch your little heart out while you continue to engage in commercialism.
Marc
I’ve got about forty DVDs, twice that many movies on VHS. I have six overflowing bookshelves. I have about five hundred music CDs. I have hundreds of computer games (admittedly, many of them written for computers I no longer own) I have a computer that is faster than I could have ever imagined five years ago, and already I want one that’s even faster. I’ve got a closet full of really nice clothes, and another of really ugly clothes. I’ve got something like five billion trading cards. I have more knick-knacks, gew-gaws, gadgets, toys, and tchotchkes than I could possibly count. I love, absolutely fucking love, materialism.
And as far as raping the enviroment goes, that bitch was asking for it, going around with all those hot natural resources. You know she wanted it. The slut.
While I can’t speak for everyone in China, most people here are a helluva lot happier with the current “socialism with Chinese characteristics” versus the previous “we are all starving together” economy.
Check out a planned Socialist economy – it’ll do wonders for your sense of perspective next time you’ve had a bad hair day after working at McD’s. Or post another rant 'cause it actually was pretty amusing.
I think the overall consensus is that the OP really needs to take a few more courses on economics.
Think of it this way: Without the middle-men, how would so many products reach distant markets? Answer: They wouldn’t. So how would things be? Answer: Medieval Europe.
Yeah. Feudalism is the way to go, baby! (There’s a reason why “feudal” rhymes with “futile”)
Well, the business man DOES create something. It is called convenience. Poor Mr. farmer would spend many days running around looking to sell off all his rice.
The farmer in your story saves time, He goes to the business man sells him his rice and leaves with money. Now Mr. farmer can go buy tools, clothes, yaks or what ever the hell he wants with greater ease. Who said the Yak breeder would want rice.
But the money Farmer boy here will work. Commerce facilitates trade and the ease of movement of goods from one place to another. Commerce provides Goods to a larger area with less wasteful time.
Osip
Some has got to use that for a sig!
This is outrageous. Something must be done about this exploitation. Tell ya what, I’ll pay the farmer 700 yen and sell the lot for 950 yen. There, feel better?
Great rant, BTW.
950 yen!? You, sir, are no better than a common bandit! Why, but two stalls over Ichiro the Merchant is selling the same amount for only 875!!!
Have you no shame?
[sub]Interesting rant. I’m waiting for the second half.[/sub]
Ummm, no. Nothing in the material world has any worth other than what someone is willing to trade for it. It’s a very simple concept.
AlbertRose, in a rant that generalizes with such a wide, slanderous scope, why pick that one small thing?
You’re right, UncleBeer, I misspoke. However, that doesn’t change the fact that it was worth 1000 yen to purchasers, and the farmer was only paid 500 for it. And people don’t always have a choice about the products they have to buy.
As for convenience? It’s not as simple as that. The merchant doesn’t simply tack on a fee for convenience. He has, naturally, his own interests at heart. Therefore, he will charge the maximum possible price for his product. He will make untrue claims about the quality of his product if necessary, keep his thumb on the scale when weighing, or find some way to increase his profit margin. Profits, and the growth of profits, are the entire point of commerce.
Take marketing, for example. Are all the products being pressure marketed twenty-four hours a day necessary? Are even a tenth of them necessary, or even advisable? Or are they products like candy, snack chips, and herbal remedies? Artery-clogging, lifespan-reducing colon-mass, and voodoo medicine. If there is no reasonable demand for your product, that’s not a problem. Go right ahead and manipulate people until they’re willing to buy it, because most of them are just waiting to be manipulated. Sell the image that eating Doritos and drinking Mountain dew all day will somehow make you an extreme athlete, rather than just turning you into a wired fatass.
The modern consumer culture is in part a product of burgeoning commerce and its bastard marketing. The necessity to create new markets is overwhelming, and as a result modern consumers are told that no problem can’t be solved with a credit-funded trip to the mall, or some number of easy $19.95 monthly payments.
Ahh, the proletariat.
They’re like children, really.
I’ve always thought it interesting that we’ve somehow placed our highest pursuit on “more”, when every other society has striven for “enough”.
Cite?
Besides, how many other societies have had the option?
You know, I drink a lot of Mountain Dew (one day, someone calculated that I had consumed over a pound worth of sugar inMountain Dew before noon) and eat Doritoes fairly often, and I keep pretty trim. I doubt that my body-fat percentage has esceeded 10% in the last ten years or so. And once you develop a serious caffeine habit, it really doesn’t make you wired anymore.
Snack foods are eaten by far more than the couple people stupid enough to believe that it is healthy for them. People like snack foods. I know I certainly do. Those same people are generally willing to pay the price the store asks as well. And if we don’t have any problem with it, I don’t see why you should.
One of my favorite things about capitalism is that it’s an economic system that depends on the principle that there’s no one with the ability to keep me from having Mountain Dew and Doritoes, because, frankly, I don’t think it’s anyone else’s fucking business. And people who think they have some sort of right to dictate my eating habits really piss me off.
And how many people have been killed by PepsiCo’s secret police? I don’t know about you, but goons with guns scare me more than the temptation to eat myself into an early heart attack.
Nothing scares me more than the concept that my steak, bread, and beer are provided to me simply because it’s in someone else’s best interest. I exist solely to consume products and generate profit, which in turn will be used to create an ever-expanding array of MORE products, which I will also be pushed to consume.
Incidentally, waterj2, Mountain Dew is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup. Not immediately analogous to refined cane sugar. You can drink all the Mountain Dew and eat all the Doritos you can stomach. I’m rather fond of them myself. However, it’s a bad assumption that the majority of people make reasoned judgements regarding the effect snack foods have on their health. Americans, by and large, are tubs of lard. Study after study has demonstrated this. Do you really think that children should pick up their eating habits from Frito-Lay and Pepsi advertising. No, there are no guns involved. However, diabetes and all the health issues incident in overconsumption are most certainly involved.
Oh, and in a capitalist system, there are all kinds of people who can deny your caffeine and cheez fix. And, in principle, any goddamn convenience store countermonkey can keep you from both. Let’s say Mountain Dew becomes less popular, therefore less profitable. Bye-bye, sugar fix. What if some marketing genius decides Mountain Dew should be less sweet, and have a banana flavor, because he wants to appeal to a different demographic? What if the normal, nominally safe artificial coloring is replaced with a cheaper, more poisonous one, just so a fucking zaibatsu can finance another shipyard. Which, incidentally, generates freighters to spread their tentacles even more widely.
So why didn’t the farmer sell it directly to the end customers for 1000 yen?
If you can answer that simple question, considering all the factors involved, you will discover why your OP is silly nonsense.