The problem is that amassing a huge wad of cash and then doling it out through a centralized foundation is structurally biased toward exacerbating corporatism, not reducing it.

An ad ridicules a grandmother for daring to knit Christmas presents for her family and shows just how disappointed they will be by her pathetically homemade gifts. Is she that stupid—or just that cheap? Doesn’t she know there’s a dotcom merchant who lists the presents they already want? Ones labeled with real brand names that people know? Cagier

If conservatives got their open marketplace and maintained a truly hands-off approach, most of the corporations they seek to liberate from government control would cease to exist. They couldn’t survive on a level playing field, because corporations are themselves a byproduct of government regulation.

Going into debt, distancing ourselves from our neighbors, and striving for conformity became equated with freedom.

For his first client, Dichter took on Betty Crocker. The new instant cake mixes were failing, but why? Dichter’s free-association sessions with housewives revealed that the product’s image of ease and convenience made these women felt guilty—as if they weren’t really providing for their families, or being adequate mothers. So Dichter suggested that

How does one grow in an ecology defined more by brands and corporations than by whatever it may have once meant to be human? Become a brand and a corporation oneself.

Populists such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs, and others speaking out on behalf of working stiffs, stoke more rage and discontent than thoughtful engagement.

From the perspective of the Communist Manifesto coauthor Friedrich Engels, however, this indebtedness was just the yoke that capitalists needed to keep labor in line. Home ownership, and the mortgage it required, would be “chaining the worker by his property to the factory in which he works.”

as originally pointed out by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” is that by removing something from its original context or setting, we kill the sense of awe that we might attach to its uniqueness. Great works of art were once intrinsically a part of their settings.