We are often told that in our "free market" economy, the "consumer is king", and that we are blessed with a fantastic (sometimes intimidating) variety of "choices", all of which leads to a significant and sometimes measurable improvement in our overall well-being.
Or does it? And if the "consumer is king", what is the producer?
Well, it's true that no one buys detergent or breakfast cereal at the point of a gun, and it's also true that up to a point the availability of a product options can improve one's quality of life (if only marginally). On the first point: while producers can't use the threat of physical violence to get people to buy their products, they can and do enlist virtually every other source of pressure, as summarized by Douglas Rushkoff in his book "Coercion". I can add little to Rushkoff's account.
The thing that concerns me now is the fact that producers are in fact "king" when it comes to the ability to influence government. I'm referring, of course, to the lobbying industry, and the seeming fact that industrial groups, and sometimes individual corporations, can use government to write (or rewrite) the rules in their favor. No way are consumer interests nearly as influential when it comes to the writing of legislation, or regulations.
The current case in point is the Bush Medicare drug plan, which, while touting all kinds of benefits for seniors, is in fact a nightmare of complexity, confusion, and in some cases disaster. The real beneficiaries of this plan are the drug manufacturers and the health insurance companies, and how could it be otherwise? Who, after all, gets to sit in the back rooms where the details of such programs are hammered out? Is is the AARP? Hardly; the Medicare drug plan was written with the approval of, and in some cases literally by, the drug and insurance industries.
So the consumer, rather than "king", is more like a "patsy", the guy who gets beat up over and over and is told that it's all for his own good, he should be loving it. The people who actually are loving it are the congresspeople who get their campaigns (and junkets) paid for, the lobbyists who get their big bonuses, and most of all the drug and insurance CEO's who take home grossly inflated pay packages worth tens (or hundreds) or millions.
