Journal thoth's Journal: Free Market Confusion 1
The comment here illustrates what I think is a pervasive confusion among commenters, and people in general for that matter. That is, the belief the free market is just *awesome* but the consumers are idiots.
That's just puzzling to me.. some folks (and extend that to politics) absolutely worship the free market. It is the saviour of mankind, it is better than omniscient, it always decides fairly, it can't be questioned, etc. But when consumers actually exercise their free market choice, they are called clueless, idiotic, etc. WTF?
The cognitive dissonance here is that consumers may make choices that conflict with some other belief (i.e. I don't like Apple for a zillion reasons I'll now bore you with ZZzzzzzz.... so therefore why doesn't everybody think like I do?????. OMG it can't be a problem with me, or the free market, therefore people are stupid sheep!)
I think these people are idiots. No, that is too kind. Raging dumbfucks is more like it, but that is perhaps not polite.
I'm by no means a free market disciple. It serves a purpose, can be studied and modeled and works pretty well at very specific things. But I do enjoy thinking about how a free market works, and how it also fails. Something I think more free market advocates need to spend serious time also doing.
Anyway, back to the quote. Some idiot anonymous coward is raging about how Apple is out to destroy computer utopia, because people are clueless you see... if only they would do whatever the idiot anonymous coward would do. As I posted in response, you can't have it both ways. More importantly, when people have choices THEY MAY NOT PICK THE ONE YOU WANT THEM TO. That doesn't make them clueless; as a economist would no doubt say, they just value various facets of the product differently.
The real clueless and stupid here is the anonymous coward.
Turning theory into ideology (Score:2)