[lbo-talk] the gains from variety

[Liza Featherstone]

I'm with Michael here. In college I had a Marxist professor who used to rail
about how it was so terrible that we had hundreds of different kinds of
breakfast cereal to choose from. I never understood why that was so terrible
- people do have different tastes in breakfast cereal, so isn't it good that
we have figured out how to make more people happy in this small and
admittedly banal way? The guy who wants everyone to eat the same thing for
breakfast is attacking the very thing most people like about the system -
and why do that? Better to be in favor of more choices and more freedom, and
to argue that under capitalism, esp. this version of it, our choices and
freedom are in fact quite proscribed.

When the left does use the rhetoric of choice, it's often effective - it
seems in campaigns against union-busting employers, for instance, people
really hate when the company is not letting them choose whether to join the
union.

Liza


> 
> Balderdash, utter balderdash!  Choice is massively important.  It's the
> essence of both democracy and humanity.  This whole new literature about
> "the tyranny of choice" is bad science.  The problem is not too many
> choices, but the hidden consequences of the proferred range of choices, and
> the extreme lack of democratic control over macro-level choices.  Attacking
> choice is the ultimate form of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
> It's also a false diagnosis of ordinary people problems.
> 
> The left's canned, knee-jerk rhetoric (ala Carrol's comments) about choice
> is one very big obstacle to our wider appeal.  We should be arguing for
> expanded choice, not telling people they're stupid for liking variety.
> 
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