Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/02/13

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Subject: RE: [Leica] The Decisive Moment or...sounds like another of those God Damn commie photographers is on some sort of socialist tear again!;-)
From: "Tim Atherton" <tim@KairosPhoto.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 11:36:01 -0700

bearing in mind that brute Capitalism is rarely, if ever a good thing
(unless you are a senior manager at Enron, or Dubya running you Primaries
campaign from their company jet ;-)  ).

Nor is the Free Market ever free - it's a theory and depends on an assumed
perfect knowledge, homogeneous and easily divisible products, and a large
enough number of market participants that no single participant could
influence the market price; with the participants acting from "enlightened
self-interest" (again, Enron shows what happens when these all fall out of
whack - as they generally do, the theory of Laissez Faire Capitalism being
adapted and adapted as circumstances change. Don't think Enron is going to
be the last such case.).

In the case of Corbis and photographers (many Leica photographers among
them!), you have a very rich man reducing the level of market place
participation to the point where he aims to become the only main player and
dominate the market. Doing so out of unenlightened self interest. It's
becoming another good example of the failure of what is believed to be
Capitalism (bearing in mind that what is touted as Capitalism today really
isn't any such thing - it's like calling what Jerry Falwell spouts
Christianity... In fact the analogy is fairly good - what is generally
called Capitalism is more like Fundamentalist Capitalism - simplistic,
warped and fundamentally unsound).

tim a

over to the LUG forum

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