I Got A Literate Letter!

 
 
 
I got a really great letter from Mark Plus, who I think used to roam the message boards at Nanodot with me from days back. I haven't posted there in awhile. I probably should. Anyway, here's his letter responding to my latest Better Humans column.
 
 
Hello, Philip Shropshire.
 

I happen to agree with the critique that wage slavery is oppressive (refer to Bob Black's essays, readily available on the Web, "The Abolition of Work" and "The Libertarian as Conservative"). A social movement serious about increasing freedom would have to find ways to reduce the amount of nonsensical activities called "work" in our so-called "services" economy, because more and more of such "work" has been disconnected from tangible production and mainly acts to keep people under subjection. I honestly don't see what it accomplishes to multiply the numbers of "jobs" in retail, fast food, telemarketing and other forms of useless humiliation and paper shuffling. Whether such tasks are performed or not has no effect on the amount of real goods that gets produced. (I've experienced more than enough of this degradation working in the hospitality industry for the past 13 years, a "career" I had absolutely no expectation of entering when I was in my teens and wanted to become a scientist [long story]. I can also see that a successful mass liberation from work will require people to stop making services demands on others, e.g., by not traveling nearly as much.)

Even much of the tangible stuff that winds up on the market wastes resources that could be put to much better uses by rationally defensible criteria (unless you've been hypnotized by "economics" that is). Despite all the propaganda about how "market forces" determine what gets produced, I'm not aware of any movie goer who ordered very expensive but unwatchable movies like Van Helsing, the budget for which could have revolutionized the field of engineered negligible senescence if spent properly. And, frankly, I could live without the mountains of junk food, Britney Spears CD's and novels about bible prophecy that the American economy piles up the marketplace and then harasses me to notice and buy.

Regards,
Mark Plus