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Consumer Freedom
Juliet Schor presents an argument to limit consumerism based on environmental protection and societal needs. She then presents some rather sophomoric counter-opinions with stronger supporting essays. However, I find her opinion to be rather socialist and quite unwieldy.
There are better ways of protecting the environment than limiting consumerism. Perhaps limiting production is the solution. By moving the supply line to the left, the demand will decrease as will the equilibrium price. Thusly people will have to be more selective in their more environmentally destructive products. I as much as anyone, am against taxes against the individual, however, taxes could be employed to raise the price and have a similar effect. It would be easier than redistributing the wealth on a national level and preserve the spending rights of the consumer.
Societal needs are an issue Schor attempts to tackle. Again, she falls short of acknowledging reality. The democracy is a body designed to preserve the rights of the individual. To attempt to blend individuality with socialism is impossible. It has been tried on multiple occasions in the Soviet Union, North Korea, and China. The nations died in a swill of corruption. They began to revert back to capitalism and they boomed for it. Perhaps the problem is not the system, but the number of people within it.
Coping with the demands of six billion people must be taxing on the Earth. Perhaps if humans had not inflated to such great quantities, resources would not be so scarce and the Earth would not be so damaged. Perhaps the problem is not within the amount people as individuals consume, but the amount of people scrambling for the limited resources at hand. The human race as a whole has grown disproportionately to its environment. Thus a destructive cycle has begun in which the human’s individual desires outweigh the capacity of the environment, and therefore, crush it. Population control is the necessary step to obsolving the societal issues at hand, not limiting consumer rights to protect an overburdening populous.
The overburdening populous continues to lumber towards its doom, however. Population growth is still quite out of control and the issues will remain as long as people are so near-sighted. I, for one, will take it upon myself to have no children and to die young. After all, quality of life is not the same as length. Quality is defined by the individual, by the consumer.
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