The educated citizen: Ah, but you have to understand (Trumpets blare royally to indicate the entry of "Economics") Supply and Demand!
Producers charge what consumers are willing to pay. It's a rational and efficient system.
The naive citizen: Screw your supply demand curves. They distort reality. In the first place, ordinary citizens are not mere consumers. In the second place your supply demand curves distort reality by suggesting a power equality where there is none.
Consumers as a group are not organized and do not possess the power of the producers, a.k.a., the capitalist class, the ruling class, the top 1% of the population, and the ruling class spends billions on propaganda called advertising and "news" to manipulate us.
No, it's not logical or just. And I am fed up.
The educated citizen: You are just unhappy because you are not on top.
Naive citizen: No, I don't want to be on top. I don't want to live in that kind of society.
The educated citizen: Where do you want to live? Communist Russia or Cuba?
Naive citizen: You seem to be suggesting that we can't make changes here...
The educated citizen: Why should we? I am happy... and if you aren't, well, maybe you don't understand economics well enough...
Naive citizen: Hello! It's not about understanding economics. I just told you. What you call "economics" is not some kind of first science. It's got more to do with the attempt to justify an unjust system than it does with discovering natural laws.
EC: You don't believe that people get rich by hard work and effort?
NC: Make me laugh.... ha ha ha ha ha... I see people working hard and just getting by. And the people I see have to pay more and more for less and less... So, no, I don't see that this is a society that rewards effort. Neither is it a society which rewards according to the actual contribution that a person makes. On the contrary, the amount of money you get paid has nothing to do with your actual contribution.
EC: You seem to be imagining a system completely different than what we have...
NC: No, it's not about "economic systems" as you call it. It's about reality, the reality
which your so-called system doesn't see, and is blind to.....the reality which reveals the
fact that your system (so-called) is just a failure.... Instead of calling it a "system", you might as well call it a "fiction"... or a lie, a lie which benefits a small class of people.....
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