I’ve never agreed with the meme that ‘companies FORCE us to buy their products’:
This charge – that corporations own customers – is another example of the lie that freedom is slavery. We are free to make choices, however. Insisting upon anything else demeans us. It is because we are free that corporations need to seduce us. Logos exist, therefore, not because corporations are strong, but because they are so weak.
– Martin Wolf (Why Globalization Works)
Socialists and anti-capitalists think that we are mindless minions that have to be “freed” from the clutches of corporations. In essence, however, is it not the truth that they need us to see ourselves as just that in order to be successful – mere infants? Don’t they understand that they are doing the same thing to us, consumers of ideas, that the corporations do with us as consumers of material things?
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)
