Peak Snack Bowl...

Overnight those cheap goods in Wal-Mart, which are the no-think economist's facile justification for Wal-Mart's decimation of communities, small businesses and employment, shoot up in price.

I've been in long meetings all week, and will be until Sunday.  Long, long meetings.  Fortunately my colleagues are all clever and witty people, or getting up early and driving through traffic would be a lot less bearable.  For the most part we don't talk politics, but world views come into contrast nonetheless.  There was some snack mix on the conference table for everyone to share, and at some point one of the engineers was picking through it for the candy pieces he liked.  Another piped up, "Hey, don't pick out the brittle!  You have to take the bad with the good you know."

The other replied, "No you don't," and crunched his peanut brittle.  Ah, I thought to myself, must be a Republican.

It's not that I think that picking through the free snacks is a political act, nor do I think it's particularly sociopathic.  The mix contained mostly good things, and if the people who got to it first had the candy and cashews and those who were less hungry had to cope with peanuts and pretzels then that's no great loss.  We were going out to dinner anyway, so perhaps saving calories for only the things you really like is more responsible than eating a big handful just to get the one thing you want.

But something about the way he said it made it sound that he thought the whole notion of having to share a common resource was, well, liberal.  And liberal in the derogatory way that right-wingers use.  If we were talking about a more scarce resource, one that we all depend on to survive, would a true conservative soften their me-first philosophy and embrace a more equitable distribution?  We see with oil, for example, a desperate rush among the "conservatives" not to conserve, but instead to be the first to burn up the easiest to pump and therefore most profitable parts of the fossil fuel snack bowl.  On the other hand the conservative governance in this country is unwilling to touch the relatively benign pretzels of reducing CO2 emissions.  The philosophy is tragic, but except possibly in kindergarten those who council restraint cannot get much traction.

The company took us out to dinner that night and we gorged ourselves on so many appetizers that many of us left half our generous main dishes half eaten.  Indeed the fellow I pegged as a Republican snickered derisively at the Democrats among us discussing exit polls and peak oil.  Americans have been awash in cheap and plentiful goods for decades, and even people in low-paying jobs have cars, TVs and cell phones.  We feel entitled to these things and look with suspicion on anyone who would suggest that we curb our gluttony.  The modern GOP tell people what they want to hear -- that the U.S. is a super-power, that the free market does the right thing, and everyone has a right to cheap goods forever -- so if terrorists attack go out and shop!  It remains to be seen what happens when the fairy tale collapses.

- jack*

Comments

[Dr. C.]

I think the fairy tale is going to collapse very soon when the dollar takes a super dive. There are increasingly common snippets in the news about things like Asians thinking of bailing out of the dollar game. If China or Japan called in our debts, we would probably have a major recession.