Week 11: Critical Reading (or rather, Critical Poster Analysis)

                I look at four World War II-based propaganda posters, and I know they were helpful in waging their campaign to make the American people limit their consumption of goods.  However, I seriously curious to know what more propaganda can do.  If the posters were successful, and were actually able to encourage the American people to consume less despite it being economic law that people will try to meet their own needs however necessary, then what else could propaganda posters do?  Say the first poster, of Hitler, had been released in today’s society to support the idea of saving the atmosphere?  Essentially, I would love to know at what point propaganda goes too far, or if it’s possible to reach that point.  In my own opinion, I think its counterintuitive to depend on propaganda, rather than to actually educate them on why they should believe a certain point.  We may be mindless masses as a whole, but individually it is quite likely we would also listen to reason rather than a poster depicting Adolf Hitler sitting next to a quintessential American in a car.

                My first discussion question revolves around the fourth poster, in which the main idea is to make sure Americans follow the new equal share ration system imposed by the government.  
Why would the government create a poster such as this when it is quite obvious that in an equal share ration system that a black market will develop?  Regardless of what a poster says, the inability of the government to correctly ration the needs of certain people would usually necessitate buying additional goods that the government may or may not know that people need in differing amounts (the first big problem  with the idea of rationing goods).

                My second discussion question revolves around need for the conservation and rationing detailed in the posters when the government could simply send the goods overseas beforehand?  In a capitalistic system, when supply of goods goes down while demand remains the same, the prices of the goods usually go up, leading to a decrease in the quantity bought by the average consumer.  Using this logic, shouldn’t the government have either lowered overall supply or simply instituted a price floor on goods rather than waste time and energy on the rationing system?

                My final discussion question is simply why these posters were needed?  If you think about it, if goods were needed more overseas than in America, wouldn’t the market for them have declined enough that the ideas shared on the posters would have become part of the American lifestyle as necessary changes?

It is understandable why propaganda posters would be used to gain support for a minority opinion or to attack an opposing viewpoint in the harshest way possible (as Fox News demonstrates so well).  Using them as an economic tool, though, is sheer genius.  If an economic goal is to be met, it is more feasible to control what the people want rather than tell them (as a socialistic or rationing economy would).  Supply and demand could be changed in the same way a successful ad campaign can, rather than going through all the messy work the government does of trying to have some control over the American economy.  Propaganda, in a nutshell, is a useful, albeit a humbling, tool to use for economic gain if used the right way.