Tag Archive: market-fundamentalism: Social Memory Complex

Denial and the Exaltation of Personal Taste

We all fetishize our preferences, but we can do better politics than that

Taco Hell

The Mises Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker recently wrote a post entitled Fast Food Is Beautiful. I know. Here’s Tucker’s definition of beauty as excerpted from the Bloomberg article he was writing about:

Every Taco Bell, McDonald’s (MCD), Wendy’s (WEN), and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who oversees three dozen workers, devises schedules and shifts, keeps track of inventory and the supply chain, supervises an assembly line churning out a quality-controlled, high-volume product, and takes in revenue of $1 million to $3 million a year, all with customers who show up at the front end of the factory at all hours of the day to buy the product.

Yup, right up there with truth, symmetry, sublimity, and sunsets, for sure.

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Do you love commerce?

As a footnote to my last post, here’s the choice Jeffrey Tucker leaves us with in his ringing defense of fast food:

Murray Rothbard used the phrase “do you hate the state?” to ferret out real from mild libertarians. As a correlative question, we might ask “do you love commerce?” to ferret out real defenders of real markets as versus those who just enjoy standing in moral judgement over the whole world as it really exists. Yes, I too am against corn subsides, and against all subsidies, as well as taxes, regulations, inflation, zoning, public roads and everything else. In a free market, everything would thrive even more than it does today, and that goes for fast food too.

I have some responses.

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