Back in the days before shrink-wrap and open bins, where a customer can inspect and even take a sniff to determine the quality of what he's about to buy, it wasn't unusual for the butcher or green-grocer to hold up a prime specimen of his wares and then wrap up or bag some putrid or rotten item that should have gone to the hogs.
The "bait and switch" was a classic, used most often on patrons who really had no choice about shopping anywhere else. Those who could act on the injunction, "caveat emptor," actually didn't have to, because it was unlikely they would suffer such disrespect. "Buyer beware," was just a way of asserting that if people were misled, it was because they weren't paying attention--i.e.their own fault.
We used to think that more competition would take care of this problem. But it didn't. The reason it didn't was because the problem was caused by an attitude. And attitudes don't go away just because the survival of a business is threatened.
Indeed, we all know that disrespect is alive and well in the malls and Walmarts that have replaced the small-town merchants. What is not so obvious is that it's actually been incorporated under a new name, "the free market."
While we all realize that nothing in the market is likely to be free, that the proponents of privatization are really about setting up a system, bound by no rules that might in any way interfere with the accumulation of wealth by world traders (and the impoverishment of everyone else) is not as easy to see.
It's a classic bait and switch. Only this time the pepetrators are much more ambitious. They've gone global. See Wolfowitz installed at the World Bank.
Posted by Hannah at March 28, 2005 11:18 AM