Starchild,
The view presented of marketing would hardly resonate with libertarians. In
fact, the major points presented replicate charges from lefties I've
countered many times.
For example: "Marketing puts an axe in our heads." The author fails to
distinguish between coercion and consent.
Warm regards, Michael
Michael,
I think you're missing the point. The axe is not a literal axe. Not everything which does not meet the libertarian definition of aggression is good or desirable.
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
Starchild,
It's not a literal axe, yet the article's tone indicates the author uses the "axe" to represent coercion, not free-market choice.
Another example of coercion in his view: "[Marketing] broadcasts messages to people who don�t want to listen."
Warm regards, Michael
Hi,
My name's Matt, this is my first time on the message boards, but this article piqued my interest.
I think that there is a fine gradient between consent and coercion. Yes, some of us consent to watching ads on television, but those ads coerce us to buy certain products with finely calculated social and economic pressures. "Buy X! We cost 20% less than the competition". That is a form of economic persuasion. "Buy Z, all the young, cool, attractive people are buying it!" That's peer pressure. No one is asking if they actually need any of these things. Plenty of young, cool, attractive people have dozens of pairs of shoes. But they only need one or two. The real axe over our heads is that, in the new disjointed marketplace, the only thing we hear is "consume! consume! consume!". If you think that advertisements telling us to consume is logical, then your right. It would be stupid for Nike to tell us not to buy shoes, or even to tell us to only buy a few pairs. But it's equally stupid for there to have been 2.5 Billion pairs of shoes bought in America last year, in a country that has only 300 million pairs of feet.
To paraphrase Starchild's article, they are manufacturing desire the exact same way they manufacture shoes.
It seems to me that industrial advertising is wielding a wide array of psychological axes over the heads of consumers, exerting pressures which are not, at least in America, being withstood.
Hi Matt,
Welcome to our list.
If you are in the process of learning about libertarianism, I highly
recommend The Ethics of Liberty by Murray Rothbard. Rothbard is known as
"Mr. Libertarian."
Please join us at our monthly meeting tomorrow at 3 PM in the SF Main Public
Library, 1st Floor Conference Room.
Warm regards, Michael
Hi Matt,
Yes, welcome to our list!
Good point about the pairs of shoes purchased vs. numbers of feet. Perhaps all those purchases served to keep the economy going if not the individual household budgets. As an aside, my daughter still likes to tell her friends that when she was little her parents would not purchase anything for her that was advertised on TV, as a matter of principle.
Marcy