A Common and Problematic Attitude Towards Big Business (And Someone Else's Brilliant Response To It)

It's no secret that Americans are pretty distrustful of big business. And who can blame us? Every day we hear horror stories of what big, heartless corporations do. And this is despite the fact that things are 100x better than they were 100 years ago!

Of course, as I have written previously, we need people to follow their self-interest in producing goods and making money in order to have a functioning society. The reason we even have blogs is because some people realized they could make a profit by investing large amounts of money to build a factory that produces computers. When done properly, everyone benefits. Just as businesses use consumers to their advantage, so consumers and society at large uses businesses to their advantage. It's a symbiotic relationship of everyone pursuing their own self-interest and everyone ending up the better because of it. That's why capitalism works.

But capitalism also only works for society when its excesses are curtailed, and I'll be darned if we don't still have problems in the US with how big business does things. And in response to a Cracked article on the way banks mistreat their customers, a fellow with the internet name mickeyten brilliantly summed up the attitude that way too many Americans have. This attitude makes it that much harder to solve the problem because it wrongly attacks consumers and wrongly justifies businesses who do wrong.

(And I know there are a few bad words that I would not have included had I wrote it, but we're all adults here). 

Mickeyten:

I take a jaded eye towards any line of reasoning that goes with 'Well, it was your fault that you weren't educated enough on the topic to realize that the experts were screwing you.' The fact that there is an entire industry running on managing finances by itself [banking] shows that a person can spend his entire career doing nothing but sorting out what rules and regulations are in place and who can do what to whom. 

It is not reasonable to expect a layman to be at an equal or greater amount of proficiency in the system than the guys who do it for a living. That is WHY we pay them for their services; with the idea that they will use their expertise to look after our interests. This backwards, f**ked-up idea that we have nowadays that the experts will use their expertise to d**k you over every which way and sideways and then laugh all the way to the bank and it's nobody's fault but your own for *not being an expert* is a symptom of what's wrong with this country. If they're doing the exact opposite (screwing us over) of the services they are supposedly offering (looking after our interests,) then why exactly are we paying them again? 

There's a level of trust that has to be present in order for society to function, precisely because of this division of labor. We have to trust that people are going to fulfill the roles they say they are, because no man can fill every role himself. The people who take advantage of this trust to suck people dry, then tell them it's their own fault, are parasites on the fabric of society."

Well put Mr. (Ms.?) mickeyten. Well put indeed.