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Consumerism
 Scott Bushee
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Christmas season is here, and along with it comes the inevitable chorus of whiners.
You have all heard them. The nice little socialist professor. The guy who wears the same Ralph Nader T-shirt every day. “We are such a consumerist culture,” is the collective sneer.
Like that is a bad thing.
I mean, really. What does it mean to live in a consumerist culture? Isn’t it just that people are able to buy and sell the things that they want to buy and sell? What is wrong with this?
Think about it. Every transaction that takes place at every store this Christmas season is completely voluntary.
Every time you walk up to the cashier, you do so because you want to. As well, every time the business sells you something, it is because they want to.
What is wrong with a completely voluntary system? Don’t free people have a right to choose how to spend their time and money? Isn’t that part of what freedom is?
Or maybe it is the choices people make that the collective whine is directed against. To this argument I grant some respect.
I personally think much of what you people do with your time and money is foolish. I have a healthy distaste for things like MTV, WWF and many other pop culture phenomena.
However, I have two responses to this.
First, I realize something that many of the anti-consumerists don’t. Please pay attention, folks, because this is important: I am not the dictator of the world, and neither are you. Though I personally disagree with a lot of pop culture, I am tolerant enough to not take offense to you enjoying it. This is key. Tolerance is a virtue not often found amongst the anti-consumerist crowd.
Second, people buying things I would never buy helps me. How is this? Simple. It spreads out the cost of the industry as a whole, thus reducing my cost.
Think about it. Imagine you wanted to buy a computer to burn the CD’s you like. By going in on the purchase with 20 friends who want to burn music they like (and you hate), you share the costs, and thus lower it for each participant.
From this we can see that, not only is tolerance virtuous, it actually helps you to practice it.
What more can you ask from ethical behavior?
Scott Bushee can be reached at: [email protected]
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