Monday, June 13, 2011

We Did This to Ourselves

It's been awhile since I ranted about something.   

Economy, economy, economy….it’s all we care about.  According to the pundits, there must always be expansion if there is to be happiness.  Contraction indicates misery.

I listen to friends tell me about how bad things are out there.  People can’t find jobs.  Nobody seems to have any money lately. Businesses are sucking wind.  Ours isn’t immune.  In the past several years we’ve watched the average market price for everyday items fall precipitously at auction.  The decline as been so steep, we now have a rather large list of items we won’t even allow through the front door due to the fact that they won’t sell for enough to justify using our valuable real estate to display them.  It’s bad out there.

My take is that we did this to ourselves.  Our free market economy encourages consumption.  That is….buying stuff, using it up, throwing it away, then buying more…..infinitum.  Marketers take pride in getting each and every one of us to buy more stuff.  Our houses are filled with it.  If we replace our kitchen cabinets with white ones this year, there’s no question that next year’s color will be anything but white.  Anyone who is anyone can’t have outdated cabinets.  Call the contractor. 

We sell homes all the time.  Recently, we sold one that had perfectly usable…everything.  It was just “outdated.”  The buyers whined about how many thousands it would take to upgrade the home.  Functionality has become irrelevant.  What matters in our society is how it LOOKS, not how well it functions.  We’ll replace solid wood cabinets with particle board ones if they LOOK more modern.  How’d that happen?  How did we get so shallow?  More than half the people on this planet would just like something to EAT or a place to get out of the cold and rain…We rip out perfectly good fixtures and cabinets so our friends won’t talk about how cheap and behind the times we are.  But getting back to my point…It’s the pursuit of all the stuff that requires an ever increasing amount of money.  We demand pay raises and minimum acceptable wages because we feel we’re entitled to new cabinetry, new cars, new clothes and a flat screen TV.  It’s the American Way.

Outside of America, wants and needs are more modest…requiring less capital.  When any four walls and a roof will do for today, the worry is not a pay raise, but rather any job that will bring in enough to provide the ability to subsist.  Jobs are going away because we live in a global economy where people will work for $1 an hour or even $1 a day.  Why pay the union guys $37.50 an hour with paid 5 week vacation, double overtime and mandatory health benefits when you can get the job done for $1 per hour and nothing extra?  In many places, people will bow at your feet for $1 an hour.

It’s easy for us to say that people who work for such wages are exploited….and there’s no question that many workers ARE exploited, but we are so darned used to the big numbers, we can’t understand how anyone, anywhere would work for the little numbers.  As a result, companies are abandoning high cost labor resources to utilize the less expensive sources.  That’s the way it is.

If it were your company, and you had to answer to shareholders, what would you do?

The relentless pursuit of stuff, economic expansion forever, and bigger things had gotten us into this mess. If everyone just wanted less and wasn’t concerned about what color the cabinets are, we’d need less money, we’d be under less pressure and we might actually be able to work for a wage that would keep us competitive.  Our desire for material things is becoming our undoing.  It’s not the government, it’s not the immigrants or the folks in China, it’s us.  

Time to take a look in the mirror and ask some big questions about where we are going.

We feel entitled to drive this...

When plenty of people in other countries would be happy with this...