Meanwhile, without any of the alternatives offered by other forms of organization (such as self-government) he is forced to rely on only one institution for all social and economic support, an institution that considers him, at best, as an expensive obligation which must be disposed of as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, government goes on, maintaining the physical and security infrastructure that capitalism requires, the cops and courts and, of course, the fleets and legions that protect the markets and the raw materials. Whatever it takes. The rest of us are on our own. Get a job.

And the capitalist, (or those who fancy themselves capitalists), are all for this. They feel right at home in this system, it rewards their agressive, competitive natures, their boundless aquisitivenness. That is, until the system turns on them, which it eventually does. Then they go looking for a scapegoat to blame it all on. How they were betrayed, stabbed in the back, lied to, abandoned, sold down the river.

Get a job.

I have contact with the “tyrannical” Federal government perhaps once a year, when I pay taxes.

I’m in contact with laissez-faire capitalism on a daily basis.

Who really oppresses us more?

Causality is diffused, and becomes something like the force of selection acting in evolution. Events evolve in a generally desirable direction from someobody’s viewpoint, but no individual’s fingerprints will ever be found.

One of the dark sides of advertising is that it treats consumers as a “collections of mindless numbskulls marching in cadence”. Or not so much marching cadence, but a herd that could be nudged in the desired direction. We might not like to be thought of that way, but advertisers make their fortunes applying that truth.

I’m not denying that people are individuals, but perhaps less so than we’d like to imagine, and certainly enough alike that companies can make money dealing with us on a statistical basis.