Here is a nice solution to a problem. City governments are usually responsible for street signs. But they can be expensive–and this is an era of supposed budget cuts, it’s hard to impose new taxes, and so on. So why not get area businesses to sponsor the signs? Businesses will pay happily to get some marketing presence, the city gets new signs at less cost to them, and everyone benefits.
But I showed the pictures briefly to a colleague, who frowned and said Más dominación por corporaciones, which I translate loosely as More goddamn big businesses asserting their control over our lives by polluting our public places with their insidious messages. And foreign corporations to boot. Or something like that.
My colleague’s reaction was automatic, but built into it is the idea that a better solution would be to force everyone to pay for the signs through taxes. That would eliminate the advertising, and the businesses would receive no benefit from their imposed tax costs. That is to say, my colleague believes implicitly that a compulsory win/lose solution is preferable to a voluntary win/win solution.
All of which makes me wonder how some people become so invested in adversarial ideologies that they so automatically reject any suggestion of the mutually beneficial.