Dear Friends,
It seems to me, if I were to write the International Capitalist Party’s Rules of acquisition, as opposed to the Star Trek, Ferengi rules of acquisition, my first rule would be, “Provide a better quality product at a better price point than your competitors…” If every business venture followed this advice instead of the new class version, “Stop competition through bought and paid for government intervention…” Which would be the Ferengi version as well. The first leads to ever better products, made at higher relative wages, with more money returned to shareholders, to invest in more businesses creating growing economy. The second leads to the situation we have today, where the pay for upper management exceeds the amount given to all the shareholders combined, while the employees are squeezed as hard as possible, turning out as defective as law will allow products, all to feed the voracious appetite of the new class, that run our industries today with their new class Ferengi rules of acquisition…
At the root of any rules of acquisition is the presumption that if the players adhere to the rules they will become wealthy. Wealth however can only really grow when the aggregate stock of value goes up. So all the players would, in the end and on average, turn out better than before. To have a system where the aggregate stock of value is corroded over time, only to feed an oligarchy, can only lead to societal disruption, increasing want and violence, as everyone scrambles to get a larger portion of a shrinking pie. Of course as the pie shrinks the more frantic people will become. Eventually, the pie will shrink to such an extent the promises made by government can no longer be met, and wide scale starvation must ensue. As those who have become utterly dependent on government and have no ability to engage in the market system, become hungry, they can only resort to violence.
Many people have a twisted view of the market system because of the egoistic and self serving nature of the new class. People look at the obvious corruption and cronyism and recoil. Where cronyism has been nurtured by the new class society has become striated. There are the haves and the have nots, the haves will always have and the have nots will never have, because government is exploited by the haves to maintain the status quo. This creates a people who are jaded to the market system and confuse free markets with crony capitalism. Which in the end also benefits the new class.
The more angry people get at the status quo the more they will empower government to make everyone equal. Of course they are just feeding the monster. The more power the people invest in government, out of ignorance and anger, the more the new class can exploit that power for their own good, to the detriment of everyone else. Calls for socialism always comes from the top of the new class, as a means to fix the problems they have created, by their selfish and greedy actions. Every communist revolution has been started this way, started and run by egg headed intellectuals, who have no suitable skills to sell in the marketplace, with the peasants, who have been barred from the marketplace by social status, making up the soldiers.
A market system is a structure in which people come together to get their needs met. When a market is truly open and free, companies that sell the best quality products at the lowest price point succeed, and those who sell defective products fail. However, in the system we have now, where those who have large businesses face competition from a new competitor, the new class that almost always run the businesses, go to their bought and paid for politicians through their lobbyists to pass regulations crushing that competition. It is far easier to stifle competition in this manner than to improve one’s product and lower the price. A free market provides ever increasing quality, diversity of products and meets new demands while rewarding employees, shareholders and entrepreneurs.
Yes, the Star Trek Ferengi are fictional. They were created to point out how evil the free market is if left unchecked by government regulation. The premise is that government is always virtuous and businesses are always evil. Such nonsense flies in the face of history and human nature. The new class however who write shows like Star Trek cannot help but put in their inculcated biases and prejudices. If people are so corrupt they cannot be trusted with free markets, then how much more dangerous if given absolute power, backed by arbitrary rule? What is really traded on a free market is value, in a crony market, what is traded is power.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
