The free market works.

It’s been less than a week since chicken chain KFC offered to pay for the repair of potholes in some cities so long as they could advertise over the patch, and there’s already a bidding war for the job. PETA has offered to pay double what KFC has, so long as they can stencil in their own, anti-KFC, advertisement, pictured below.

It should say “KFC Tortures Delicious Animals”, amirite?

Now, I’ve talked about how completely batshit insane PETA is before, but their ideology doesn’t matter this time, my point remains the same. This is just a fantastic example of how the free market solves problems without government intervention. Not even a week after a private company offers to do something that most people think only government can do (namely: fix the streets), another corporate sponsor offers to pay double for the same thing. Both corporate sponsors have selfish reasons for doing what they’re doing, and both actions will have a positive outcome for society at large. It will fix city streets and cost taxpayers nothing.

The potential for this kind of thing is endless, and it’s because of the magic of advertising. Let’s hope it catches on.

“I think Che had perseverance and morality. Being the underdog and fighting against injustice and standing up for the forgotten moved him so hard. Kind of like Jesus, in a way…”
“I think anyone who buys a T-shirt of Che has gotta be cool. If I see someone with a Che T-shirt, I think, ‘He’s got good taste.’”
-Benicio Del Toro

“To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail … This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”
“If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba), we would have fired them against the heart of the US, including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.”
-Che “Kind of like Jesus…” Guevara

The irony is thick, as it always is. His face is on suburban t-shirts all around the country, and Hollywood is making a hero out of Che Guevara, aka the butcher of La Cabaña, the man who killed journalists, businessmen and merchants, presided over mass executions, prison labor camps, and caused economic ruin to millions.

Admittedly, there’s a certain romance around him. He was trained as a physician and traveled the world as a revolutionary, fought in jungles and all that fun movie stuff. The thing is, he killed actual people and had a real ideology of oppression. Che’s socialist plan was about oppression at its core, as socialism always is. It was about forcing the personal will of a few powerful men on the rest of society. While the capitalism he hated so much is about the combined will of all citizens. Capitalism is an amazing computer which calculates the desires of every person with every choice they make. The free market is a reflection of the wants and needs of each participant. The best example is this: in a socialist “paradise”, a group of people cannot create a capitalist commune if they want to; yet, in a capitalist paradise, anyone can create any type of commune based on any type of system they want. Socialism can exist in a capitalist society, but not the other way around. In the end, capitalism is about freedom, and socialism… isn’t.

So why do so many people wear Che’s image? Because human beings have an innate drive toward cultism. We need to belong to some group, while at the same time we need to rebel against tradition. And Che symbolizes a certain hard edged secular religion, and a vague rebellion against everything. His brand allows you to be a rebel and still fit in. His real ideology is meaningless at this point, and his face is simply a design element, like the Nike swoosh or the golden arches or the silhouette of Michael Jordan dunking. So you can’t fault the wealthy suburban teenagers for wearing it, it’s fashion, and they don’t know any better.

In the US, we’re comfortable, away from all the pain and suffering of the third world, so we can fantasize about anything we want. We can rail against genetically modified crops, while in Africa they save millions of lives by allowing more nutritious food to be grown in less fertile land, with less space. We can complain about third world “sweatshops”, while in those countries, the workers have the choice of working either in those factories, or as subsistence farmers making less than half what the factory pays. We can talk about the horrors of capitalism, but capitalism has given us the freedom to be so wrong. Without the years of free market capitalism giving us the wealth we have, we wouldn’t have the free time to complain today or the social freedom to express our poorly thought out views in t-shirt form.

Ironically, the Che face of today symbolizes that more than anything else, the triumph of capitalism over socialism. He’s been fully assimilated by the free market, with t-shirt companies and Hollywood studios making money from his image and consumers using it as a fashion statement. Freedom has won, Viva la Revolucion.

Ok AdSavvyites, it’s time for some audience participation.

I was reading one of my favorite blogs, David Friedman’s Ideas, and he had an interesting topic: Ways to promote your political ideology. Let’s say you’re a moderately wealthy and talented individual with a strong desire to promote a certain political viewpoint. How do you go about doing it? What’s the most effective, efficient way to get it done? You want the most amount of change for the least amount of money and effort. I want to hear your ideas.

First, let’s consider some of the more common methods:

1. Political – You can try to work within the existing political framework. Find a candidate who agrees with your views, and work to get that candidate elected by donating and buying advertising for that candidate. You may even try to run for office yourself, although that has a pretty low chance of success relative to the amount of money you need to spend.

The thing is, when they make it to office, most politicians don’t do what they say they will on the campaign trail. Barack Obama is a good example of that. Many of his supporters are starting to realize that his policies won’t be as radical as they seemed to be, and he will end up just another American President, doing exactly what McCain would do, although for different reasons. So, judging from history and what you can see even today, the political route is the least effective way to spend time and money if you really want to political change.

2. Intellectual – You can work outside the political framework and try to use advertising or media. You can write a book, or in a blog, a newspaper, or magazine; or try to spread your ideas to people who are more influential than you are, so they can reach a wider audience.

Traditionally, this is the easiest way one person can make a change in the world. David Friedman wrote “The Machinery of Freedom“, which is one of the most influential books in the history of the whole anarcho-capitalist movement. He’s done more with that book than he ever could have with donations or political advertisements.

Ideas are powerful things.

3. Indirect – Instead of trying to spread an idea or working within the political framework, you can actually do something that may encourage changes in the world. An example of this is Kiva.org, founded by Matt and Jessica Flannery back in 2005. Kiva.org is a microfinance institution that allows regular people to lend money via the Internet to other regular people in developing countries.

An example that David Friedman uses in his blog post is the invention of the birth control pill. Apparently, the development of the pill was funded by a donor who thought a safe, reliable form of female contraception would have the social benefits that she wanted. Another great example is the Seasteading project, initiated by Patri Friedman.

The idea behind seasteading is to develop fairly inexpensive technology for floating housing and eventually small cities. The theory is that it would make citizens more mobile, and that would make governments more competitive. When the cost of switching governments decreases, governments start to operate more like businesses, since there is more competition, and that increases the quality of governments.

Now, my question to you is, what else is there? Are there any other ways that one man can promote his politics and change the world? Let’s hear them, AdSavvyites.

Almost every year we hear about scenes of consumer chaos and lunatic stampedes as shoppers knock each other down while trying to snatch up quality deals on Black Friday. This year an unfortunate man in New York was trampled to death in a Wal-Mart by a bastard herd of sub-humans who didn’t even look back at his body after they crushed him to death with their very nice shoes.

They have to be sub-humans, right? That’s the only way we can rationalize something like this. This has to be a one-of-a-kind incident where a group of sociopaths were all at the same place at the same time. Real, well-adjusted people would have stopped and helped that man. You would have taken charge of that situation and helped that poor man up and scolded the people who didn’t. Everyone thinks that. But no one ever does that.

This is one of the dark secrets of the human mind. It’s in all of us, the potential for this kind of disgusting, deadly apathy is part of every single human being. It’s been shown time and time again: the death of Kitty Genovese, where a dozen neighbors heard a woman screaming as she was stabbed to death, but did nothing; the Milgram experiment, the famous study which showed that average people will give what they believe to be fatal electric shocks to a person as long as another person in authority tells them it’s ok; the stampedes of Black Friday which happen almost every year and almost always end up with some poor unfortunate person trampled underfoot, although not usually killed; and, of course, the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany, the most striking example, where a whole country of seemingly ordinary people followed along with it’s leaders brutal “politics”, and did nothing while six million Jews were killed.

In psychology, these things are called diffusion of responsibility or the Bystander effect. In economics, there’s a similar effect called the Tragedy of the Commons. It’s a well-known problem of the human experience and it’s important that we look at it directly and realize it’s there so we can attempt to avoid it in the future.

Advertising is all about influencing the crowd, and the more you learn about it, the more you realize how easily the crowd is influenced. Use this knowledge to avoid the perils of conformity and obedience. Take responsibility for what happens around you, don’t fall for these cognitive diseases. You’re better than that. If just one person would have stopped to help that fallen man at Wal-Mart, maybe it would have inspired another, and another, and then the people who didn’t help would have felt the pull of conformity drawing them to actually help. In situations like that, one knowledgeable person can make a difference. That person can be you.

Researchers at Leeds University, led by Prof Jens Krause, performed a series of experiments where volunteers were told to randomly walk around a large hall without talking to each other. A select few were then given more detailed instructions on where to walk. The scientists discovered that people end up blindly following one or two people who appear to know where they’re going.

The published results showed that it only takes 5% of what the scientists called “informed individuals” to influence the direction of a crowd of around 200 people. The remaining 95% follow without even realizing it.

“There are strong parallels with animal grouping behavior,” says Prof Krause, who reported his study with John Dyer in the Animal Behavior Journal. “We’ve all been in situations where we get swept along by the crowd but what’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another… In most cases the participants didn’t realize they were being led by others.”

This is excellent example of how the human brain is setup for social life. Even without a top-down organizer or any obvious rules, society just falls into place. Unfortunately, that “follow the herd” mentality isn’t always beneficial. If we’re not fully versed on a subject, we tend to follow the guy who appears to know more than we do. That sort of behavior applies to more than just random walking, we do it in everyday life from picking political candidates to deciding what type of car to buy.