They probably couldn't have predicted it in detail, but I doubt they were so utterly naive as not to see that it would profoundly change the culture.

I'm not neglecting the benefits. That is a separate issue. My thesis is that corporations have the power to make culture-altering and life-altering decisions for the rest of us without our consent, and that they do so with the full blessings of government.

No they do not. Without consumers, the corporations are powerless. If corporations make things that people do not want, they go out of business.

We have a choice: a centralized, planned economy (we've seen the abyssmal failure of that approach in the old USSR) or a free market in which individuals get to decided what they purchase. Given that we all have different needs and desires, the latter is highly preferable.

We've already covered that. I'm talking about before, and you're talking about after, when the horse is already out of the barn. The consumers didn't make the decision to turn the horse loose, the corporations did.

I think the best solution lies somewhere in between. I also think we've beaten this horse to death. Thanks for the debate. :)

An inbetween solution is like being a little bit pregnant. We either have a free economy in which use of capital is determined by the owners - or we have state planning.

It's not either/or at all. We already have government regulation of our so-called free market. Companies can no longer freely sell DDT in the US, for example. Perhaps it would save companies a lot of research and development costs if they submitted product ideas to the public before they actually produced them. Don't ask me how it would be implemented; it's just an illustration of the simple fact that ideas needn't be limited to ideological extremes. ;)

It is important to make a distinction of regulations based upon real and verified harm (ex post facto) and those that are pre-emptive.

In the former, the capitalists who invested in DDT lost considerable amounts of money. They paid for the risk they took in bringing a product to market.

Pre-emptive regulation seeks to undermine the free market by preventing products which consumers would, if allowed to exercise their liberty, wish to purchase. This smacks of the opportunity for political abuse, especially by competitors who wish to hobble an adversary.

You're assuming they would purchase them if left to their own devices. And of course they probably would, thanks to the massive onslaught of TV and radio commercials, magazine ads, and billboards that would inevitably tout both the previously undiagnosed lifestyle deficiency and the remedy for it.

C'mon SM. Nobody puts a gun to a consumer's head and forces him to purchase anything - except the government in order to extort his taxes.

What do you propose in place of allowing free markets to work?

They hardly need to put a gun to anyone's head when it's so easy to plant suggestions inside people's heads. Example: would you really give a rat's kiester if your teeth weren't gleaming white like bleached porcelain if Madison Avenue wasn't constantly telling you that dingy teeth are a Bad Thing?

I'm not proposing anything. I'm demonstrating how corporations are the real policy makers in the consumer cult.

Your demonstration requires the assumption that consumers are just mindless drones who cannot make decisions constituted to further their own wellbeing and enjoyment.

No, it doesn't. As I've already shown, the consumer has no say in what products reach the market. He only has ex post facto veto power to remove products from the market.

And granted, some consumer products are necessary for one's well-being. I daresay the necessary products constitute a small percentage of all the crap produced though.

The consumer doesn't have to buy something he doesn't value. Those who do purchase it must attach some value to the product (unless you want to resort to the mindless drone theory).

Why is another consumer's purchase of something that you do not care for any of your business?

If your belief that every individual is an island unto himself were even remotely plausible, then it would be none of my business. In reality, we all share a rather small planet with a closed ecosystem and finite resources. The resources you so casually refer to as "private capital", "consumer products", and the like are in fact drawn from a single dwindling pool of resources that are the common inheritance of mankind.

I'm back to how to manage this other than the free market.

Yes, we are all interconnected. We either each take responsibility for our lives, which includes living harmoniously in the world in addition as part of the equation, or we have a super elite that centrally plans how we live. Nothing is ever going to make everyone happy as we do not have a monolithic system of values and taste. The free market is still the best way to make compromises among all of those competing values. The lure of the benefits of state control is illusory. That much concentrated power is far more deadly than consumers making their own choices.

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.