"The customer is always right!" Anyone who has worked a day in their life knows that adage. It's the first rule a company teaches its employees. And by logical deduction, this means the employee is always wrong.
Government, on the other hand, tends to lend its employees the benefit of the doubt, though it is entirely lacking in the customer service department. Anyone who has dealt with an expansive bureaucracy can attest to that fact.
So which is better? That's not a question I can answer. The debate between the merits of Big Government and Big Business, and between the public and private sector, always struck me as being somewhat like a debate between which of your parents is the "better" or "nicer" one. The answer is that it doesn't matter, because both parents are part of the same team, and they both are playing "Good Cop, Bad Cop" in order to manipulate you into following their rules. If you want freedom from one parent, you must have freedom from both.
The public/private debate also distracts from the true class conflict, which is that the workers' rights are perpetually at odds with the customers' rights. Whether Capitalist or Communist, economists run into the same problem: better hours and more favorable working conditions negatively impact the customers' experience, while better customer service comes at the expense of generally unfavorable working conditions.
And yet, are the two not really one and the same thing? Most of the people in this world are both a customer and an employee, though not usually both at the same time. The two activities are instead bifurcated into how one lives between 9 and 5 (working for the boss), and how one spends one's leisure time (shopping for products and enjoying them). So whatever occurs at the customer's expense, or at the worker's expense, is really just affecting the eudaimonic balance of each person's life, instead of favoring one person over another.
With that in mind, it would appear (to me at least) that the collective will of the people is really the only solution to the conflicting interests of Consumerism and Laborism within Capitalist society, or any other society for that matter. Let the people decide what balance they would like between the two. If they would prefer to work hard and play hard, then let Consumer rights have more weight, whereas if they would rather have more leisure time, then Labor rights should receive greater favor.
That is the only solution I can think of that truly acknowledges the problem.
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