I Am Boring

So, there's an interesting (possibly only to me) article on Slate about how Trojan came to dominate the condom industry, becoming a brand with the recognition value of Kleenex. What interested me the most was this passage:

Youngs Rubber, meanwhile, sued a company making Trojan knockoffs, a legal maneuver designed to underscore its commitment to quality. More important, the company lobbied state and local governments to enact laws restricting the sale of condoms to pharmacies alone. Since Trojans had become the preference of pharmacists, the brand was guaranteed a virtual monopoly in markets where these laws were passed.

One of the best teachers I had at New School was a gentleman by the name of Jim Nolt, a poli sci professor whose focus was on the effect that business has on politics. And here, it would seem is a textbook example of the things he tried to research and point out; legislation or policy created because of lobbyists, (and, probably) graft and bribery.

Pro-free marketers might point out that maybe it was a good thing for condoms to be sold in pharmacies, which is the only reason why legislators would have agreed with the viewpoint of Youngs Rubber; that the free market fulfilled a social need and created a social good while simultaneously fulfilling their own agenda of creating profit. The problem lies in the second part of that statement; corporations exist simply to make a profit. If they can make a profit and create a social good, they will do so. If they can make a bigger profit by creating a social evil, they will also do so, provided that the negative cost (from bad publicity or whatnot) is outweighed by the monetary reward. So you can't depend on corporations to fill the needs of society; they are ultimately beholden only to their shareholders.

It makes you wonder...is there any form of effective government? Communism is crap, and capitalist democracies are crap, so what's left - anarchy? And yet I have a difficult time subscribing to the ideal of anarchy espoused by people like Banksy and Alan Moore, who see people as inherently nice, fluffy and happy. I think anarchists are essentially romantics; like Rousseau, they believe in the idea of the noble savage, that people are fundamentally good and would be good to each other if there were no external constraints. I'm not so sure. This is also not to say that they (well, Alan Moore, at least) believe in some sort of magical, violence-free revolution; rather, there is a distinction to be drawn between the chaos that results directly after the fall of government and the utopian anarchic state. There is, of course, no map or timeline for this process, as there rarely is in utopian visions; it's just something they assume will happen because, again, people are fundamentally good.

I don't know, I wish I could believe that but I don't think I can at the moment. Perhaps that speaks more about where I am in my life right now than to any higher truth.