[lbo-talk] My Recent Encounters with Chinese Capitalism

[123hop at comcast.net]

One of the great films of all time is "Third Man" -- based on a Graham Greene novel. An American, Holly Martins, comes back to Vienna after WWII to bury his friend Harry Lime. It turns out Lime isn't dead. He's been running all kinds of black market rackets, including watering down penicillin. He's been pretending to be dead to avoid jail. In one of the final scenes, to explain his deeds, Lime meets Martins at the Ferris Wheel in Vienna. As the Ferris Wheel takes them higher and higher in the sky, and the pedestrians below shrink in size to mere dots, Lime says to Martins, "look at those dots. Imagine that each one of those dots was worth 80,000 pounds." As good a summary of capitalism as I've ever heard.

Joanna

----- Original Message -----
From: "michael perelman" <michael.perelman3 at gmail.com>

The minor inconveniences and ripoffs that we experience are nothing
compared to what most of the world experiences.  They do, however,
illustrate the nastiness embedded in the capitalist mode of
production.  As a trained economists, long tutored in the ideology of
capitalism maximizing utils, I am amused by my educational experience.