Anti-consumeurism and the war against the poor

Anti-consumeurism usually flares up as the holiday season nears, but it's always in effect. The basic belief of anti-consumeurism originates in sacrifice religions like Christianity and Islam, which decry "the world" and prosperity as evil, and continued in communism, nazism, and other statist extremisms which decry rich people as exploiters and abundance as evil.

This belief is that consumption is an inherent evil, a product of unnecessary greed, which is bad for our moral fiber or religious fervour and can only be tempered by some form of economic collectivism or social engineering.

However, this belief, while being explicitly an attack against the most prosperous amongst us, is really part of the war against the poor. While all these collectivist belief systems preach equality, they promote radically assymetrical systems with strong ruling classes. Sacrifice religions have their clergical ruling classes, communism and nazism had their dictatorial ruling classes. Both stand to benefit the most from the suffering of the masses, in that they can channel that suffering for their own utilitarian ends. This has always been their mode of functioning and is still their mode of functioning (the perpetual wars in our modern democracies are oen example).

The masses are the most vulnerable to economic conditions and the availability of cheap products. Take health care, for example. Socialists in Canada always say that a capitalist health care system creates a "two-level" system that is bad for the poor. And yet that is what we already have in Canada today : friends of the state and celebrities get VIP treatment, and the rich can always go to the United States for treatment. The social elite can compensate for bad economic dynamics better than the masses can. Joe Sixpack need Wal-Mart, but Kevin Costner doesn't. Once again, this comes back to the notion I already discussed of capitalism being a boon for the masses more than for the ruling classes.

A dilemma related to anti-consumeurism is, where do we draw the line ? Obviously buying the food necessary for our survival is all right (although some extremists take it to the absurd and preach self-sufficiency), so how much is too much ? Well, the answer is obviously whatever their value system tells them is "enough". Like any other part of the cultural war, this is a battle of value systems, and the anti-consumeurists seek to make their value system law.

Is Christmas too commercial ? In fact, anyone who knows the history of Christmas also knows that consumeurism saved Christmas. To praise Christmas and then complain that Christmas is too commercial is a contradiction. To villify gift-giving is incredibly callous. But to the collectivist mind, force, not compassion, is the rule.

Anti-prosperity, anti-greed and anti-consumeurist beliefs stand in direct opposition to the expression of individual values in Western society. They know very well they can't persuade people to change their values, because they have nothing to offer, so they complain and try to pass laws. That's how all these anti-social types operate. Wal-Mart is a good example of this.

In fact, Wal-Mart proves nothing better than the fac that people are idiots, and follow Franc's Principle slavishly. People hate Wal-Mart because it drives inefficient and limited competitors our of the market, but they love Wal-Mart when it tries to drive its smaller, minimum wage competitors away by driving wages up. So once again, people hate the free market, people hate the poor (as main beneficiaries of low-priced competition), people hate the expression of values (through the capacity to consume more), and people love government control. No surprises there.

About Wal-Mart, I am looking forward to the movie "Why Wal*Mart Works and why that makes some people C-R-A-Z-Y!". Of course, the statists on Amazon are already complaining of propaganda. And we accuse them of propaganda. The more relevant question is : who's right ?