A Danger to Civilization

To the Editor

They are a danger to our way of life, they must be stopped. Those idealistic students and the underemployed former middle class who support them want to ruin our society. We must support our corporate rulers in their battle to suppress and discredit the Occupy Movement. If we do not, then we face economic disaster.

This statement is overly dramatic but does contain some truth. They do aim to destroy our way of life. They are not against democracy or the rule of law, they do not want to demolish civil rights or kill capitalism; although the target is a close cosine. They want to end consumerism.

To understand why this aim is a danger, we must realize how our economy works. Growth is good. You hear it in the media all the time; “an expanding economy is a healthy one”. If we have a demand for goods and services, then companies will expand to meet this need. They will employ more people, who can then afford to buy more stuff. Or so the basic theory goes. (If they employ people in Asia it does not help us here.)

An example: The many news articles that talk about keeping ‘market confidence’ high. They are really talking about encouraging people to buy stuff. If the people are not confident in the stability of the economy; the security of their jobs, they may buy less and thus decrease the demand for stuff. Companies in response will produce less and require fewer workers. Out of work people don’t buy very much, so the market instead of growing will shrink. This is economic depression.

However the Occupy Movement has a different outlook on the situation. They see consumerism as a key problem, rather than the useful driving force of the free market. To understand what consumerism is, we must consider the business man’s point of view: The absolute worst product to sell is an item that never needs to be replaced, because you can not have an endless volume of repeat customers. Conversely the best product is a single use item, which will need to be replaced frequently.

An example: Disposable cheep crap made in Asia is the general result of consumerism. Advertizing gets us to buy stuff we don’t really need. Low-cost low-quality manufacturing ensures it will not last very long. Being produced in Asia means part of each $ we spend departs the country instead of circulating here. Aside from being bad for the abstract balance of trade accounts, this activity leads to overspending on the part of the individual and massive amounts of garbage, most of which is still not recycled.

Before Christmas we saw ‘buy nothing day’ to draw attention to this issue. Most people thought it was a harmless. But if you think hard about it, the danger of the idea should be clear. If we buy less, the corporations will see their profits decline, thus they may abandon their big box stores, putting people out of work; economic disaster.

So let’s keep the consumer system strong by running up credit card debts, to buy cheep stuff we don’t really need. Because the alternative is just too uncertain to face.