Saturday, 13 August 2016

A Matter of Motivation.

I saw a headline on the BBC news website which read:

NY City Billionaire Offers Reward for Stolen Ice Cream

I decided to read it, hoping to find a rich man with a heart. I saw it in my terms, you see; I hoped to read that a man had made an offer-that-no-one-could-refuse to catch the nasty little tyke who had snatched a child’s ice cream. I didn’t. I found a seemingly well overfed man called John Catsimatidis.

He owns a chain of grocery stores called Gristedes, and his bleat is that thieves are ‘wreaking havoc’ in his stores by stealing his (his) ice cream and selling it to bodegas. You have to feel sorry for him, don’t you? You have to ignore the fact that he seems to be missing a point here: that crime is the natural corollary to a free market economy. The more free market an economy becomes, the greater grows the motivation for crime. They’re inseparable bedfellows. And he isn’t even offering a decent reward. It’s a mere $5,000, which is rather less than insignificant loose change to a billionaire.

He reminded me again that while plants and animals achieve their potential, human beings generally don’t.

So maybe somebody from NYC can tell me that Mr Catsimatidis is actually a wonderful person who gives freely of his time and wealth to help the poor and disadvantaged (because a totally free market economy is highly competitive, so you inevitably have to have rather more poor and disadvantaged people than rich and well-advantaged ones. The American Dream is a myth as long as the human condition maintains its depressingly low level vibration.) That would be nice.

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