Ghostwriting Experience

I ghostwrote an essay for my old high school buddy who's now in business school.

Having neither the knowledge of economics nor the writing skill, and ghostwriting that essay more than a week after the real one was due, I was certainly not involved in any true dishonesty in that ghostwriting experience. On an intellectual level I know that I should not therefore feel any guilt for writing in answer to someone else's prompt, in (an attempt at) his voice, and under his name.

On an emotional level I also felt no remorse, no gut instinct telling me to come clean. Perhaps the lack of fear of being caught left my myopic self-interest unengaged, and without that all perceived wrongdoings were no more emotionally weighty than the cartoonish crimes of the villain in a bad action movie.

Perhaps my lack of experience being caught in a truly damaging lie lets me connect the cause (dishonesty) and the effect (punishment) only vicariously.
Perhaps I'm just so arrogant that I don't think the reader deserves the truth.
Or Perhaps I'm so lacking in confidence that I don't think my name as an author has any meaning.

I said in class that while capitalism is an evil necessary to the smooth function of our society but an evil regardless and therefore we should not let money control production where it will not amplify production. I now am starting to think that that evil is small in comparison to the evil of widespread compulsory honesty. If a lie will enable the synergy of a famous image with a genius for composition (not that my ghostwriting experience had anything to do with either of those ingredients) then let it be so.

Wikipedia and Tying

Tying: Using monopoly power to dominate complementary markets (Machulak). For example- if I'm dominating the flour market and want to get a foothold in the sugar market I might sell those two products together. Recent cases against Microsoft in the US and Europe illustrate how this practice is frowned upon in the economic world.

Similar practices can be found in the political world...
One might piggyback a personal project onto a bill that is otherwise very strong in order to pull it through. In a less clearly objectionable case the public may elect a politician due to his/her popular stance on many issues and accept her/his less popular stances on less critical issues.

There is no way that I see to mix and match the attributes of many politicians into one super-candidate or eliminate effects of the nature discussed above without fundamentally redesigning our system; is it also necessary that this platform phenomenon extends to the ubiquitous political parties and through those to our very identities?

Though this political 'tying' cannot be attributed the stigmata of a monopoly that is only a mitigating factor to the central issue that it takes power away from the people.

One important check to the towering (I almost said monolithic) bipartisan structure is regionalism- the democratic parties of two different states may differ on many points and that difference is seen even more acutely across the borders of nations.

But Wikipedia is global. Wikipedia takes its homogenized (if subtle) political 'consensus' everywhere, and the emergence of sites countering that agenda only exacerbate that problem, taking power away from the individual.

Unrelated Ghostwriting Anecdote

I worked as a summer school teacher where at the end of each two week session the teachers were supposed to write a brief comment for each student. A week or so after each session it would become apparent that one or two of the teachers (not me!) had skipped town without writing their comments. At that point some poor summer school office assistant (again not me, thank goodness) would have the privilege of ghostwriting those comments, not having ever attended the class, met any of the students, or even the teacher. All this in the name of the continuity of the comment record and, more importantly, making parents feel good about having signed up their kids.