I'm not posting this quote from What Are People For? by Wendell Berry because I agree with it. I don't know if I do. But it is thought-provoking and I'd like to hear what everyone thinks.

The ideal of competition always implies, and in fact requires that any community must be divided into a class of winners and a class of losers. The division is radically different from the other social divisions: that of the more able and the less able, or that of the richer and the poorer, or even that of the rulers and the ruled. These latter divisions have existed throughout history and at time, at least, have been ameliorated by social and religious ideals that instructed the strong to help the weak. As a purely economic ideal, competition does not contain or imply any such instructions. In fact, the defenders of the ideal of competition have never known what to do with or for the losers. The losers simply accumulate in human dumps, like stores of industrial waste, until they gain enough misery and strength to overpower the winners. The idea that the displaced and dispossessed "should seek retraining and get into another line of work" is, of course, utterly cynical; it is only the hand-washing practiced by officials and experts. A loser, by definition, is somebody whom nobody knows what to do with. There is no limit tot he damage and the suffering implicit in this willingness that losers, should exist as a normal economic cost (Berry 131).