It's a valid point - but I don't think it's quite complete.
That's one side of my family's history. My great grandparents were hard-working ill-paid stained glass artisans, my grandfather worked his way up as a clerk, and made beautiful model boats in his spare time, my father went to university and became a prosperous long-hours-working executive who found he had less and less time for making things as his career developed.
My grandfather lived a long and I think generally very happy life. My father died young, with many regrets.
I'm living my life on the principle that I'd rather have a life with much less money, that I love, than a life that makes me miserable and ill that I can only escape for two weeks expensive foreign holiday a year. I'm pretty sure my great-grandparents would be baffled and think I'm a complete idiot, but I think my father would have understood.
Working your way out of poverty is a good thing, but it's not good to exchange poverty in money for poverty in other things. I'm very grateful to Le Guin and her works for helping me understand that there is a choice to walk away, if not an easy one.
I think, tying this back to Ursula's point, is that everybody should have the freedom of choice. If they want to go to school, work 80+hours a week as a lawyer and be wealthy, they should have that opportunity. If they want to live in a cottage, eat once a day and make beautiful art, they should have that choice. (Though I would prefer that artisans get paid for their art, and not the middleman who sells it). Being forced to make art because it's either that or starve is every bit as heinous as the "for profit" attitude that regards books as product, controlling their content.
Middle men are incredibly useful, and earn their pay. Middlemen who are gatekeepers are not, but in a free society, their power is limited. I recommend Tom Sowells' Basic Economics or his Migrations and Cultures series for a good overview of the phenomenon.
I think we should all be free to make the choices and accept the consequences of those choices that we want. Here in the U.S. we usually are. Forcing people to purchase (directly or otherwise) what they do not want, don't think they need, and usually at the cost of what they actually do desire is oppressive.
Heh. Define greedy. Do you try to get the best price you can for your books? Or do you volunteer to get paid less, so that someone else can get paid more? Do you sometimes volunteer to pay more when you don't have to, just because you think the work deserves it? Or are you glad when you "luck out" and get a good deal? This kind of behavior is rare, but workable within a community of people who all know each other: see the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Because the middleman (like the banker) has to pay for not just the cost of doing business, but the cost of doing business with con-men and "not-part-of-the-shared-community-of-trust, they frequently charge much more than seems "fair" to the insider. And this common economic misunderstanding, plus the human tendency toward tribalism, explains why middlemen are often minorities, and frequently subject to pograms.
See: Jews in Europe, East Indians in Uganda, Lebanese in Africa, inner-city Koreans here in American.
As long as no-one has his finger on the scales (rule of law) or is being co-orced (socialism), trying to get the best price - either paying the lowest or charging the most - is just what people trading their work do.
And this particular game of "anti-capitalism" directed animosity towards easy scapegoats--fuelled by economic illiteracy, results in real hate crimes up to and including mass murders.
Please reconsider this particular blame-game. It's unwise and unhelpful.
That's one side of my family's history. My great grandparents were hard-working ill-paid stained glass artisans, my grandfather worked his way up as a clerk, and made beautiful model boats in his spare time, my father went to university and became a prosperous long-hours-working executive who found he had less and less time for making things as his career developed.
My grandfather lived a long and I think generally very happy life. My father died young, with many regrets.
I'm living my life on the principle that I'd rather have a life with much less money, that I love, than a life that makes me miserable and ill that I can only escape for two weeks expensive foreign holiday a year. I'm pretty sure my great-grandparents would be baffled and think I'm a complete idiot, but I think my father would have understood.
Working your way out of poverty is a good thing, but it's not good to exchange poverty in money for poverty in other things. I'm very grateful to Le Guin and her works for helping me understand that there is a choice to walk away, if not an easy one.
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I think we should all be free to make the choices and accept the consequences of those choices that we want. Here in the U.S. we usually are. Forcing people to purchase (directly or otherwise) what they do not want, don't think they need, and usually at the cost of what they actually do desire is oppressive.
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See: Jews in Europe, East Indians in Uganda, Lebanese in Africa, inner-city Koreans here in American.
As long as no-one has his finger on the scales (rule of law) or is being co-orced (socialism), trying to get the best price - either paying the lowest or charging the most - is just what people trading their work do.
And this particular game of "anti-capitalism" directed animosity towards easy scapegoats--fuelled by economic illiteracy, results in real hate crimes up to and including mass murders.
Please reconsider this particular blame-game. It's unwise and unhelpful.
Reply
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