Webwork - 2:56 pm on Jul 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

jsinger, in the context of the OP's proposition - "I'm going down because a monster is eating my sheep" - all I'm suggesting - as an alternative - is that one doesn't go down sheep-like.

The marketplace dialogue about big box retailing, with its "beneficial" scale and efficiency and lower prices, eviscerating small business communities across the world and broadly altering a way of life - where retail profits that once stayed in the community are now passed on via stock options and where the shopkeepers once lived in a house not that different from the one that the white collar folks lived in - the dialogue about this trend isn't over yet. Communities are starting to push back. Collective bargaining by labor may yet be reborn. The price of gas may make the short trip to the local merchant a bit more appealing. All things in their time.

Before any one business becomes the next, after the next and next and next business to succumb to this new economic reality, one should consider all approaches - including a call to action, to wake up the opiate induced "low cost is all that matters" masses - to wake up and face the reality.

Do I think it will work? No. Not until we reach a critical mass of what I do not know. I think we - humankind - are pretty slow on the uptake of larger scale issues. We tend to wait until we have a crisis on our hands or in our own backyards and see our own individual houses burning before we shift priorities and act. We are so darned busy and overworked and overwhelmed just by the business of maintaining the status quo that we keep waiting for someone else to fix things. We don't even write letters to our Congress or the local paper. Healthcare? Global warming? Social security and Medicare stability? Deficit spending? Like sheep to the slaughter we are, all the while anxiously hoping that everything will all turn out. "Someone will fix this because they have to." Meanwhile, the icecaps melt and deficits grow.

The sheep are anxiously waiting for a voice of reason, to give them a bit of direction. Perhaps to rally them. Michael Moore doesn't quite do it for me but his existence - he presence on the stage of the marketplace of economic ideas - somewhat of a distant scion of Ralph Nader - is to me sign that the masses are getting fed up and are beginning to see that their own economic interests are increasingly at risk. When folks are willing to pay to see what is largely a policy piece in their local theater that tells me folks are looking for a unifying voice, likely a consumer or "I am an economic unit voice.

So, who wants to step up next? One may go down in flames or, possibly, one may be the beneficiary of an advancing point of the next economic revolution . . of sorts. I'm not quite ready to give up on the little guy. I'm not giving the economic undercurrents a name quite yet but addiction to the "low price opiate of the masses" is one thing we will have to face - again. At some point the "benefits" of the economic efficiency of the marketplace will erode the social underpinnings that support the economic efficiency - or, perhaps better said "the wealth redistribution" efficiencies of the marketplace - and then things will get interesting.

What was it that finally brought down the monarchy in France?

Did the price of a loaf of bread play a role?

I say that if you have no real chance agains the economic moster of big box retail, compounded by the low price opiatization of the masses, the least one can do is to remind people that, in time, we always do it to ourselves when we fail to see the bigger picture.

So, show them the picture - the economic reality - of the latest round of improvements to the economy.

Like I said: I think there are only so many improvements this economic model can sustain. The there will be evolution.

Or . . . revo . . . no . . no . . that'll never happen, right?

Well, that was fun. Now, back to paying the bills and making a buck.

[edited by: Webwork at 3:07 pm (utc) on July 6, 2007]