Let’s assume that I’m trying to get a new job. I’m kind of fucked, mainly because you’re reading me.

Seriously. Anyone who looks up “Ferrett” online, even in passing, will discover that I have littered the Internet with a wealth of profanity-laden tirades on controversial subjects. I mock abortion, I mock racial issues, I think dick jokes are funny. There aren’t a whole lot of Fortune 500 corporations that are going to look at that and go, “Wow, I need to have that time bomb ticking away in my marketing department.”

According to the Republican paradigm of capitalism, if I want a better job I will have to clean myself up for the marketplace. After all, what I have to offer isn’t what the customer wants. So I’ll have to spend days culling/altering old articles and removing them from Google…. And then take several months to write new articles in which I reinvent myself as a professional, forthcoming citizen with a new identity in order to transform my whole being for the corporation!

Or I could just lie.

The problem with the Republican view of capitalism is that they forget “lying” is the easier option. For me, I could just use my birth name, which cheerfully lists my publications on Amazon. And no one, at least for now, would be the wiser.

This wouldn’t be an issue, except that the Republicans genuinely seem to think that marketplace pressures force businesses to be honest with their customer. “If they’re not honest,” the line goes, “Then some other honest person will come along and steal their business! All you have to do is make a better product, and the world’s your oyster!”

The issue, naturally, is that you don’t have to make a better product. You have to make what looks like a better product. And the difference between “looks better” and “is better” is one that’s pretty goddamned vast at times.

Case in point: there once was a time, not too long ago, in which milk was generally taken from poxy cows, watered down to give it more bulk, and then filled up with chalk. Beef was routinely cut with sawdust, and butchered in places in places that were festering with shit and disease.

How’s your customer supposed to know all of that?

That’s a hidden cost, particularly to city-bound folks who’ve never tasted real cow milk or had alternatives to the crap they got. It’d be nice to think that the butchers would change of their own accord, but… How are the customers going to know? They don’t visit the meat-packing plants and see your chalk-dusting habits.

All of those nicey-nice habits that make things better for everyone cut into your profits. All that Wall Street cares about is profits, and if you don’t cut your milk with chalk then you’re judged as a less efficient system than those who do.

The capitalist system, in fact, encourages the businessman to cut corners and leave messes for other people to clean up later.

But wait! The myth of the capitalist system is that it runs on honesty…. So let’s assume that someone exposes you. They come in with a journalist and uncover your hideous milky activities! The public is turning away in droves!

What’s cheaper?

a) A wholesale revamp of the milk-creation process where you buy better and more expensive cows, put more actual milk into each bottle, and then ask your customers to pay the same amount for each bottle while you’re now paying substantially more on each glass…

OR:

b) Hiring a publicist to say that the conditions at that one milk-plant were deplorable, and by gosh you’re cleaning that up right now, and you make some token gestures to wait it out until the media forgets about your milk problems.

Unfortunately, the cheapest alternative is – you guessed it – lying.

The issue with the free market is that it doesn’t encourage “the best” product. It encourages the cheapest approaches that will sell. And in many ugly cases – not all, but enough – the cheapest approach is covering up the truth.

The free market makes what’s best for businesses… And that is, on the whole, a good thing. Businesses drive economies, and you want healthy economies. You want as many smart guys as possible working to make themselves rich by serving the public interest. Regulations are a necessary evil that do choke profits and drive those smart men to look elsewhere, and you should use them sparingly.

But conflating the happiness of businesses with the happiness of people is an outright lie. Businesses are there to make profit, not happiness – creating happiness is a wise tactic that smart businessmen use, and one that works much of the time, but it is not a necessity.

The myth says that competition will always produce a better product… But in unfettered capitalism, competition will often result in the guy who has a better, cheaper, and more durable product having a mysterious fire that destroys his warehouse.

(Or the bigger businesses gang up on him to drive him out of business before anyone else hears about this. You know, whatever works.)

You need government regulations to make lying as expensive as possible. Because businesses are neither good nor evil; they merely do whatever makes them the most money. Thus, the more incentives you can give so that “being truthful” is the least expensive option, the better.

That’s what I say, right here, in this journal. At least until it comes time to find another job, at which point I’ll be someone more palatable.

(Tell me I'm full of it)