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Wenchie, your chief default assumption is that the Great Big Western Joyride is going to last forever. Your vision of the benign capitalist bringing all things good to the world in perpetuity rests on the nineteenth century premise that a limitless supply of raw materials will always be available. What will it take to make you realize that your values and tastes - indeed the very luxuries of making consumer choices and debating the relative merits of this market system and that - will mean squat when there are no resources left to make products to cater to them? When you say that unimpeded free market competition is the best way to manage resources, you completely overlook how extremely wasteful our culture of mass-produced disposables is. What free market competition boils down to is a weiner contest to see who can make the cheapest load of crap the fastest - in essence, pitting supposedly civilized beings against one another in brute Darwinian dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest fashion, squandering their inheritance in a neverending race to get nowhere before the other guy does. It's ultimately pointless because all ten billion of us will get there at the same time.
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