Hi Mary Anne,

I would've gone into the default capitalists who really qualify as users but erred on the side of relative brevity. The bankers and in many modern instances the CEOs and board members of the world's largest corporations are default capitalists that are users and not really creators.

Capitalism is full of dangers too. I am continually disappointed in the US enforcement of antitrust laws. The merger of banks has made service a dirty word. It costs money to see a human teller and yet also costs money to use the automated teller. The Wal-martification of the big retail outlets is also squashing service and their habit of hiring illegals to keep wages low so as to undercut their competition is repugnant and harmful to the country.

Industrialists that are merely exploitive rather than creative are truly users at heart and while they thoroughly understand supply and demand their personal ethics leave a lot to be desired. At the very bottom and top of large companies you will find the user mentality. In the middle - where the designers, builders and marketers reside - this is where the true creators exist. There are a whole gaggle of $250,000-$10,000,000 dollar a year CEO types which float from company to company and are default capitalists, who arrive at corporations cut wages, mess up products and basically serve themselves to the wherewithal of the hard work of others. These are users as well and are not creators. They are the default capitalists that don't really understand capitalism but only understand capitalism enough to see how it can be used to serve themselves.

In smaller companies most - if not all - the employees are creators, including the entrepreneurial bosses.

Capitalism is not perfect and there is a lot of fine tuning that can be done when using the creator/user precepts but it is not invalid because of these exceptions.

Journalists often reitierate or slightly rewrite what comes out of Reuters or AP. The creating here is at a very low level. If indeed it were nurtured and the Journalist became an author, their politics would surely begin to morph as they start to appreciate the necessity of supply and demand which compensates them for their own unique abilities.

Thanks for the sentiments.

I'll be drinking my hot tea and dunking hard gingerbread cookies in the cup by a warm, crackling fire. Hope you and your family have super holidays as well.

SDAI-Tech1

PS.
I had a feeling you might answer that one and I confess to having laid a few obvious MA snares throughout the post ;-) Santa doesn't count slightly wicked stuff done this late in the year does he?