You, Wat Tyler, wrote:

>I fail to see how corporations can be considered anything other than the
>logical consequences of demand for products. It can't be the case that
>supply creates demand. It must be the case that buyers consider certain
>products will make life nicer.
Ah, a gadfly. Good!

The responses to this all hit an obvious point, the role of demand
formation, which in itself suggests a "naive" explanation of its own.
Maybe this is also naive, but it seems to me that leftists might bear in
mind that the circulation of commodities is what it's all about in the
modern economy. So whether it's entirely demand-driven or aided by
carefully targeted  advertising, the fact remains that the system that
keeps us alive depends on it. Axe the military-industrial complex? Fine.
What do you tell the tens of thousands of workers (and neighbors whose
jobs depend on the patronage of those workers, and their neighbors in
turn) who will be put out of work as a result? Try to imagine how many
canoes Grumman would have to build to equal the stimulative effect of one
B1 bomber. End old-growth logging? Great. How do you convince the
communities that depend on old-growth logging that this is in their
short-term interest (remembering Keynes' famous line, "in the long run,
we're all dead")? And so on.

The "sustainability" mantra only gets one so far, and that's not very.
The intrinsic logic of the current system is one of inexorable expansion,
and so far, alternatives to that system have either a) supported
primitive economies that no one other than the Unabomer would want to
live in or b) been command economies with their well-documented failures.
It's a pretty frightening proposition, that we are on an accelerating bus
driven by a madman, but I don't see how we can get off it. Any ideas?

_________
Tresy Kilbourne, Seattle WA
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and
hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless
series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." --H.L. Mencken