The Narrow Way
Fraught with peril, ripe with adventureArchive for June 22, 2009
An economic system built on greed
It was really only a matter of time, this global economic crisis we got ourselves into.
And when I say we, I say there’s plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the ledger.
Truth is cracks in this economic system we know and love where bound to happen sooner or later.
Sure, the entire thing has unraveled in a bizarre anti-free market fashion south of the border.
Bail out for the banks? Are you kidding me?
But maybe that drastic decision involving billions upon billions needed to bail out bleeding lending institutions averted disaster of global warming proportions.
That’s if you believe the hype.
Any way you slice it, government intervention in a free market economy just doesn’t make sense.
The crooks got away with one this time.
(Those CEO’s of banks that no longer exist made how much last year?)
But needless to say, the entire system was ready to cave in on us any way.
Think about.
We’ve developed a way of life that’s dependent on people buying things.
The only problem is, it’s built around having things we don’t really need.
Oh, for sure, there are somethings we just can’t live without.
We need a refrigerator.
We need a lunchbox.
Some of us need wheelbarrows.
But much of what we are told we “need’ in our society is based on artificial needs created by… drum roll please… advertisers.
And the very nature of advertising has changed.
In the good old days, ads told us what a product was and what it did, maybe even why it was so good. Today, product placement is the name of the game, and goods aren’t sold as much as a perceived upgrade to our quality of life, whether we want to believe it our not.
We may not really need that fancy-smancy barbecue, but a backyard bash without one is pretty lame.
Bologna sandwich, anyone?
And oh, we may not need that $30,000 car, but man it sure gets looks from the “chicks.”
Of course, we already know all these things, but choose to remain under the spell of consumerism.
Why?
Well heaven forbid if we would come across as free thinking individuals, who balk at the notion of keeping up with the Joneses.
Besides where would our economy be without people up to their ears in credit debt?
Somebody has to buy the stuff we “need,” the new TVs, and video games systems, cell phones, garage door openers, electric car starters and battery-operated back-scratchers, and seasons 1-5 of our favourite prime time shows.
But the real problem is we hate to be told we can’t have something right bloody now, whether we need it or not.
Impulse purchase?
Why not?
We work hard for or money.
We deserve a break today.
Besides there’s no money down, no payments until 2016.
Buy now, pay later.
Sound good.
Sounds easy.
Delayed gratification?
What kind of a you-only-live-once gotta-have-it-now consumerist would want to embrace a concept as mundane as saving up for something?
Buying something with cash is so 1950s.
Sure, we’ve had our cake and ate it too, but now the cupboards are bare.
We’ve thrown away the basic fundamentals of financial health, and we thought obesity was North America’s number-one problem.
Listen: I’m as sick to my stomach as anyone as the loss of manufacturing jobs continues to mount.
We’ve out-produced ourselves.
Some of those jobs were for making things we need; others maybe not so much.
But a job’s a job.
It pay the bills.
Help feeds the kids.
Goes a long way when trying to keep a roof over your head.
If you’ve haven’t noticed or heard, cash is no longer flowing freely because, quite frankly, people just don’t have enough of it nowadays.
Stock prices are going down as food prices go up.
Gas prices are anyones guess.
Some people won’t be able to retire this year as planned.
Maybe not next year or the next.
So what gives?
Wasn’t capitalism the next best thing since sliced bread?
Didn’t Communism get its butt kicked?
Didn’t we win?
Maybe it’s the Institutionalization of Greed as professor Prabhu Guptara suggests. In a recent address in Washington, D.C., Guptara stated that “what we have is a culture of greed that was politically sponsored and politically promoted, a culture justified by reference to Adam Smith’s notion of the Invisible Hand, that if everybody operates in their self-interest then somehow, magically, everything is looked after.”
He says that unless we confront this truth, we will never begin to understand the problem, let alone address it.
This idea that selfishness drives the economic system of capitalism seems to be true.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s argues that communism failed in Russia because it neglected to take advantage of new technologies as “revolutionary fervor” in socialism dwindled.
“In the end, then, capitalism triumphed because it is a system that is robust to cynicism, that assumes that each man is out for himself. For much of the past century and a half men have dreamed of something better, of an economy that drew on man’s better nature. But dreams, it turns out, can’t keep a system going over the long term; selfishness can.”
Krugman penned this before the recent global economic mess. Despite the inherent greed at the heart of the current crisis, the Economist recently proclaimed in its editorial that capitalism, “for all its flaws, it is the best economic system in the world.”
It suggests that we must learn to manage the crisis that comes along with capitalism better, with the right amount of legislation and regulation in place (a tricky balancing act if you ask me).
However, any system that has greed and self-interest at its root doesn’t give me much confidence, even if it’s hailed as numero uno.
Besides, while capitalism has worked in our favour to makes us North Americans among the richest in the world, it’s created another entirely different set of problems.
Guptara says we have “public disenfranchised and debilitated by unrealistic material expectations.”
The things money can buy don’t satisfy as we’ve heard so many times before.
Yet somehow, we allow ourselves to live under the spell of consumerism, that mindless untracked, undisciplined spending that, in many cases, is meant to ease the pain and drudgery of everyday life. Somehow that never works, since the things we really need in life, other than the basic necessities, can’t be bought.
I’m no economist, but I’ve learned financial lessons the hard way because, after all, a fool and his money are soon parted.
And the society we’ve built, with its excessive consumerism, sures looks foolish in a lot of ways, which leads me to believe that our collective greed is a recipe for disaster in more ways than one.
© October 31, 2008. Elmira_Independent. All rights reserved.
Crisis of environmental conscience
Really, I don’t consider myself to be an environmentally unfriendly kind of guy.
Like a lot of other people I recycle religiously, even try to refuse plastic bags at the grocery store, although a lot of clerks have quickly bagged what I’ve bought before I’ve had the chance.
I even walk instead of drive whenever possible and actually like public transit whenever I take it.
But recently, my respect for the environment was put to the test, and I blew it. I chose the wide road that leads to global warming hell.
Truth is, I was conflicted.
Here was some lady “yaking” on her cellphone parked at the curb in front of our house, car idling all the while – and I did nothing.
Not after 10 minutes, or after 20 minutes, or after half and hour.
Seriously, this lady loved to talked, and obviously wasn’t discouraged by high gas prices to keep the car running and air conditioning going throughout the marathon telephone call.
Of course, it crossed my mind a number of times to knock on the ladies’ window and tell her to shut her vehicle off.
But in the end, perhaps out of respect for her privacy or “right” to do such a stupid thing, I did nothing.
Now I’m not a confrontational person by nature, unless of course I’m living in a basement apartment and there’s a Portuguese family living above that’s invited company over, and it’s well after midnight and I can’t sleep because they’re shouting to heard over each other.
But that’s another story.
No, I’d rather that stupid people come to the realization that what they’re doing is stupid all on their own. But some people don’t get it.
I mean, this I-don’t-mind-letting-my-car-idle-forever lady obviously didn’t care one iota about what carbon emissions do to the air we breathe.
And car idling is a hot button issue right now, because there are a lot of people who want more done to crackdown on idlers.
Poor Tim Hortons (an oxymoron if there ever was one) is being taken to task for their successful business model of serving coffee and donuts, to both police officers and the rest of us, in our cars via the drive thru window.
I’ve even read about some goody-two-shoes green thinkers who snub the drive thru, preferring to park it and join the lineup inside instead in an effort to save the planet.
Not surprisingly, researchers hired by Tim Hortons concluded that impact of short periods of idling in the drive thru, as opposed to parking and using counter service, is negligible.
Convenient science, you may say, but that’s something I’ve heard for years.
However, that really only makes sense if we’re talking really short idling periods of just a couple of minutes.
Given the high prices of gas these days, some drivers are looking for ways to conserve fuel.
Edmonds.com’s six-step list to reduce fuel consumption included an excessive idling test. The result was “more important than we assumed” states the website and the recommendation was to shut down the engine if stopping longer than a minute.
For the test, two cars drove a 10-mile route stopping 10 times and shutting down the engine for two minutes each time. Then the same route was driven at the same speed letting the car idle for two minutes at each stop.
The test concluded that by avoiding unnecessary idling, a driver could save up to 19 per cent in fuel costs.
A similar idle vs. restart experiment was conducted by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in Florida.
A crack team of researchers attempted to bust the myth that letting your engine idle is uses more gas than shutting it down and restarting.
In fact, what the mechanical engineers found out was that, using a vehicle with a V6 engine, restarting it used about the same amount of gasoline as idling for six seconds with the A/C on.
However, road tests nixed the idea of shutting off an idling car at stoplights, which could save a driver as much as 25¢ a day in gas (considering you average 10 minutes sitting at stoplights).
That’s because the demand placed upon the car’s battery and starter would wipe out any major savings from the cost of a major repair.
Which brings to mind the last time I went through the McDonald’s drive thru for a $1.39, 550-calorie double cheeseburger.
Being environmentally conscious, I opted to shut the car off while stuck in a painfully slow line of vehicles, and sat there for at least 4-5 minutes saving fuel and carbon emissions from killing the planet.
Despite my concerns for clean air, I’m not sure I’d do that again.
Frankly, I can live without those cheap, terribly fattening double cheeseburgers, if it comes to that.
But I can’t live without my coffee and the regular trips to local restaurants that cater to my addiction.
And I know a move is afoot to ban people out there from taking advantage of drive thru windows, and put their foot down on businesses that have customers lined up in idling cars for their products.
If we’re actually serious about the protecting the environment, then we need solutions that make sense, not the tokenism that such a ban would smell of in our car-dependent society.
It all makes me believe that the push for alternative forms of transportation and education about the impacts that our car-dependent way of life has on our health, is the most important factor in reducing carbon emissions from vehicles.
It seems a bit odd to crackdown on someone idling for five minutes at the Tim Hortons drive thru on his way to work each day, when his environmentally-conscious neighbour, who doesn’t do such things, drives three or four hours to the cottage every weekend.
Those who had the foresight and business savvy to open drive thru windows didn’t create this monster we call carbon emissions.
It’s been towering over us ever since we created a world in which personal travel by fossil fuel powered contraptions is no longer the exception, but the norm.
And in most driveways, you can times that by two.
© 2008. Elmira_Independent. All rights reserved.
