In the United States, a program in recent years in education was to pay kids to read books. Should we pay kids to read books? Or is this part of why the U.S. is a market society rather than having a market economy? Will the kids then stop reading books for the sheer joy of reading or for learning, and pick up the value that everything has a price?
Were you aware of professional line standers? Were you aware that lobbyists pay homeless people to stand in line for them?
It seems that everything in America is laden with money, laws are made because of money. Politicians stay where they are because of money. The rich fund the politicians, and they want something back, in the form of laws and bills that help them acquire more wealth.
Poor people don’t shop in the same store as wealthy people or even middle class. We don’t live in the same neighborhoods.
Tell me, in your opinion, are we crowding out other values in the U.S. for the love of goods and money?
© 2026 – SoulSequel
9 responses to “Does the U.S. HAVE a market economy or have we become a market society?”
I would also like to say that according to the data, the kids that read books for money did, in fact, read more books, but they also read shorter books.
Yes.
@spitfire3dc What do you think about the notion of paying kids to read or paying them for good behavior? Are we instilling our already warped values of goods and money over wisdom, knowledge, cooperation, humanity etc?
@Scarlett I think it is counter productive.
Reading is a reward unto itself. Exercising imagination through reading can be directly applied towards creative problem solving and life is just a series of problems requiring resolution.
To pay someone to experience enjoyment sounds like a form of prostitution to me and who, really is the one being used in sexual prostitution anyway?
I think a warping is definitely in progress. If you have to pay someone to experience benefits (enjoyment, escapism, knowledge attainment…) what do you give them to do something that needs to be done, but no one wants to do it?
Reading is the best thing I do, because it has no limits. I can do it as much as I want, I can read whatever I want, and I can make fiction into my fiction just like I can take fact and make it mine. I don’t know who I would have become if I didn’t know how to read??
To promote reading we could write quotes that the guy on the currency said, on the currency.
“My wooden teeth are made from a tree I chopped down as a youth.”-George Washington
“Four score & twenty points ago, TOUCHDOWN!”-Abraham Lincoln
“We’ll bury them in the basement.”-Benjamin Franklin
@luftballooneyegouge were you aware the cherry tree story was a lie?
@Scarlett
Did you know George Washington was actually King George III?
https://www.royal.uk/george-iii-r-1760-1820
https://www.royal.uk/sites/default/files/images/encyclopaedia/edit-rs151225_404837-lpr_0.jpg
@luftballooneyegouge its good to laugh first thing in the morning
A main drive of capital is endemic to capitalism.
Other social systems still struggle with issues of capital and the associated greed/fear cycle. The best-adjusted and long-lived of them, do seem to have found main social drives aside from just capital.
Both people and nations tend to become that which they most strongly identify with. Does the capital serve the society? Or does the society just serve the capital?