Ralph Benmergui is one of Canada's most skilled and endearing broadcasters, at least in my view. He has a new podcast called Not That Kind of Rabbi. Besides being a great on air personality, Ralph's other passion is spiritualism. Ralph was ordained as a Spiritual Director through the Aleph Ordination Program, at the Aleph Institute both in Boulder, CO and Philadelphia, PA. Hence his new podcast.
I listened to an episode last week and his guest was a card carrying capitalist with a fundamentalist passion for his cause. I couldn't listen to the entire hour. This guest, who I don't even want to mention by name, posits that we all have every opportunity to make it big like he did, regardless of where we came from, our skin colour, our education, our birth parents...and so on. I've met people like this in the investment services industry (and in my own real estate industry) and they too leave me cold. I feel sorry for them but that's for another blog entry.
I think of this because here in Sien Reap, Cambodia, and in all the other communities we've visited, this brand of capitalism is on display everywhere, all the time. Very few people here seem to be employed by anyone. The rest of the citizens are entrepreneurs in the truest sense...no support system, no government grants, no easy access to capital, no marketing education and so on. Frankly, if this is what this guy's brand of capitalism looks like, I want to have nothing to do with it. It ain't pretty.
Every road, every street, anywhere there are people, are lined with entrepreneurs, all selling essentially the same thing. The Lunar New Year celebrations are all about beautiful flowers. Many streets offer hundreds of flower vendors, all with beautiful displays, all selling exactly the same thing. In the tourist towns, all the souvenir shops, of which there are perhaps thousands, are all selling the same hats and t-shirts. One more important fact...as we drive by these shops, 99% of them have no customers. Capitalism? Blah!
Negotiating is what these entrepreneurs do and when we arrive in town, we're encouraged to do the same thing. The tuk tuk drivers take us everywhere we want to go for $2.00. I can't negotiate that. I just can't do it. But, apparently, many well-off tourists, rich people from around the world, try to squeeze them for a buck. Shame on them.