Well, folks, I tried to bring down the world’s economy by staying home on Black Friday, and it didn’t work: by golly, the Dow had its best week since 1932. Apparently it’s not necessary for us all to keep spending ourselves into bankruptcy to keep this country going.
Not that some didn’t have their hearts in it. In Palm Desert, enthusiastic shoppers got excited enough to take a few pot shots at each other, killing two. Even more amazingly, at a Long Island Walmart happy consumers trampled an employee to death in their stampeding ecstasy over the bargains to be had inside the store. Wow! What a country.
Now I enjoy the consumer society as much as the next person. What could be better than being able to buy every electronic toy, every glad rag, every ludicrously sweet and gummy riff on a cup of coffee the human mind can conceive in every city, town, and wide spot in the road? And yeah, I know it’s unAmerican to resist (not to say futile). But here’s my problem with consumerism as the driving force of an economy:
It’s fake.
It doesn’t DO anything. It’s hollow. It’s empty. It’s a STIFF PARROT. Dependence on buying as a major engine—possibly the main engine—in our country’s economy means that we depend on hot air. On nothing. Why? Because we’re producing less and less. Try to buy something that’s made in America—go ahead: try to find a baby’s crib manufactured in this country. Read the label on a package of hamburger: the mashed meat you’re buying came from Mexico and Canada, with maybe a little coming from the U.S. Americans aren’t doing anything productive.
Oh, you say: but we’re all doing brain work. That’s why we need such a highly educated workforce.
Ever notice how many young people with solid degrees from excellent universities are working in call centers or selling books and gewgaws at a Barnes & Noble?Ever actually looked at what goes on in high-rise office buildings? Not much.Most of the activity entails pushing paper, whether physically or electronically. Have we counted lately how many of our people spend their working lives answering telephones or pushing papers? Or selling stuff, most of it imported? Few of these jobs are highly paid, because few of them deserve to be highly paid. Because they produce nothing.
As the real estate bubble was blowing up, I recall wondering who all those houses were being sold to, and how. Most of the people buying new Styrofoam-and-plaster houses were already living in the Valley, in perfectly fine block homes in perfectly fine neighborhoods. They were being induced to take on huge mortgages to move (about once every three years, at one point) into cheaply built structures in elbow-to-elbow tracts. This was called “development.” Basically it was a form of churning. Nothing of much value was being built, and nothing that made our city better was happening.
Go out to Scottsdale, Arizona, and you’ll see mile on mile on mile of expensive homes, well beyond the means of a family with one middle-class earner and well beyond those of a family with two middle-class earners. Where, I used to wonder, was all that money coming from? The answer, as we all know now, was nowhere: it was make-believe money.
It was fake. Fake money generated through bad lending practices and paid for, all too often, with jobs that produce nothing.
We need to get back to making things. That cheap labor overseas to which we’ve outsourced our productivity is undermining our economy in more ways than simply making well paid blue-collar jobs extinct. It has sapped the intrinsic value of what we do for a living, and in doing so, it saps an important part of our people’s work ethic and, ultimately, our country’s ability to survive. Americans expect to earn more than slave wages for factory work. And a population that earns more is in a position to pay more. Over time, the off-shoring of productivity and the influx of cheap goods have meant that our real wages have dropped, because employers do not have to pay us as much to keep us happy (in a superficial way) and because the unions that used to keep our wages up have been mothballed. Prices have had to come down not because stuff is produced more cheaply overseas but because American workers couldn’t afford the products if they were manufactured by people who earned a fair wage.
America’s economy needs to be rebuilt. We need to structure our economy on production, not on paper-pushing, circularity, and sales commissions.
