{"ops":[{"attributes":{"bold":true},"insert":"[Missed Part 4?"},{"insert":" "},{"attributes":{"underline":true,"bold":true,"link":"https://community.criticalthinking.org/blogPost.php?param=226"},"insert":"Read It Here"},{"attributes":{"bold":true},"insert":"]"},{"insert":"\n"},{"attributes":{"italic":true,"bold":true},"insert":" "},{"insert":"\n"},{"attributes":{"italic":true,"bold":true},"insert":"What Is Irrational Production? "},{"attributes":{"bold":true},"insert":"[2 of 2]"},{"insert":"\n"},{"attributes":{"bold":true},"insert":" "},{"insert":"\nAs Adam Smith recognized, private vested interests naturally try to increase their wealth regardless of the public good. Hence, ironically, no private interest is in favor of more, but rather in favor of less competition in its own industry (unless an increase in competition would increase its own profits). When it is possible to take advantage of the public, private interests will almost inevitably do so. Thus, during OPEC’s oil embargo, U.S. oil companies raised their own prices at home as well as abroad even though internal consumption of Arab oil was no more than 10% of our market. The OPEC action, in other words, provided a convenient excuse to join in a monopolistic practice of a special interest cartel. The result was windfall profits extracted from the U.S. public under artificially created, non-competitive conditions. The public, on the other hand, was continually led to believe that “Arabs” were exclusively to blame, as though U.S. companies hadn’t taken advantage of the situation to advance their own interests, irrespective of the public good.\n \nI am arguing that the nature and conditions of production and productivity are never things-in-themselves, forces independent of political and social decisions, but rather intimately bound to such decisions. These decisions may be rational (in the public interest) or irrational (against the public interest). Whether they are the one or the other, can only be determined by full and fair public argument. If a nation is to function as a democracy, then its citizens must be armed with the critical thinking skills which enable them to penetrate the propagandistic arguments which are creatively and adroitly developed by private interests to keep violations of the public good from public recognition. The history of the country is shot through with cases in which the public was deceived into supporting policies in which public interest was sacrificed to private greed. A tremendous price in lives and resources has been paid as a result of the public’s inability to think critically to a sufficient degree to protect itself from irrational modes of production. We are, in my opinion, very far from the sort of educational system which nurtures the economic survival skills the public needs to protect itself against highly sophisticated propaganda which routinely advances private greed against public good.\n \nIt is crucial that we grasp the inevitable struggle that will continue to be played out between the ideal of democracy and protection of the public good, on the one hand, and the predictable drive on the part of vested interests to multiply their wealth and power irrespective of public need or good, on the other. In a society based not only on the ideal of democracy but also on a market economy that produces large concentrations of capital and vested interest, the power of the voting public is only as great as the information upon which the public can base its votes. To the extent that it is possible for concentrations of wealth to saturate the media with images and messages that manipulate the public against its own interests, the forms of democracy become mere window dressing, mere appearance with no substantial reality. As John Dewey remarked in "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"Individualism, Old and New"},{"insert":", “financial and industrial power, corporately organized, can deflect economic consequences away from the advantage of the many to serve the privilege of the few”. Unfortunately, but predictably, the political parties, heavily dependent for their success upon the raising of large amounts of capital, “have been eager accomplices in maintaining the confusion and unreality”. (p. 114) Dewey saw the issue as fundamental to whether the democratic ideal would be achieved, and as being determined by whether "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"force"},{"insert":" or "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"intelligence"},{"insert":" would prevail:\n \nThe question is whether force or intelligence is to be the method upon which we consistently rely and to whose promotion we devote our energies. Insistence that the use of force is inevitable limits the use of available intelligence . . . There is an undoubted objective clash of interests between finance-capitalism that controls the means of production and whose profit is served by maintaining relative scarcity, and idle workers and hungry consumers. But what generates violent strife is failure to bring the conflict into the light of intelligence where the conflicting interests can be adjudicated in behalf of the interests of the great majority. (p. 79f)"},{"attributes":{"indent":1},"insert":"\n"}]}