[grecy]

> If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.

Then you wind up with things like Fox "News" (actually Entertainment, NOT news) being popular, because they found that entertainment is much better at making money than actual news. If you let "making money" be the decider, lots of valuable things fade away.

[tedks]

The answer is that those things are not valuable. People don't want news. This is not a bad thing. This means that people aren't like the elitist ideal of what you want in your socialist utopia.

Real people happen to like Facebook and Fox News and Snapchat and Yo. And that's fine. To say that those desires are somehow immoral because they aren't lofty enough is elitist, condescending, and anti-humanist.

[Karellen]

I'm not sure it's entirely correct to claim that the set of "things that people want" is equivalent to the set of "things that add value to people's lives".

I'm also unsure as to how arguing that such a distinction might exist could be construed as elitist, condescending, or anti-humanist. And I've no idea at all how you got the idea that it might imply that the desires, of people, for things which do not add value to their lives, are immoral.

(That is, that the desires are immoral, not the people. Crikey that last sentence is hard to parse. Sorry.)

Or socialist? WTF?

[trhway]

>If you let "making money" be the decider, lots of valuable things fade away.

20th century was spent exploring the alternatives to such a decider. As the result we do know that "making money" is the most efficient and effective decider that humanity has so far been able to come up with. Basically the humanity is just too stupid to use anything else at the moment.

[jkaunisv1]

I find it so strange when people make this argument, that a century was "spent" exploring these alternatives. I don't disagree that "making money" is our best heuristic so far, but it's not like the entire 20th century was devoted solely to exploring these options. There are various other concerns intertwined with the economic strategies that competed. Fascism could have won, Stalinist communism could have won, and it would not be accurate to say that any one economic strategy is the "best we've got" just because they came out, geopolitically/militarily, on top.