By Charles C. W.
Cooke
Monday, November
15, 2021
At Bloomberg, Allison Schrager hopes that our current supply-chain issues serve to alter Americans’
behavior. “Suddenly,” Schrager writes, “Americans can’t spend like they used
to. Store shelves are emptying, and it can take months to find a car,
refrigerator or sofa. If this continues, we may need to learn to do without —
and, horrors, live more like the Europeans. That actually might not be a bad
thing.”
Counterpoint: Yes, it would.
I don’t want to live in Europe, or to
“live more like the Europeans do.” This is not because I am inflexibly
“anti-European.” There are many wonderful things about Europe, and I will
happily wax lyrical about them when asked. But, having spent a great deal of
time in both places, I can assure you that it is considerably easier to live in
America than it is to live in Europe, and that one of the main reasons for that
— beyond Americans’ being so stonkingly
rich — is that Americans are far, far
more demanding of their marketplaces. For Americans to look at their
temporarily broken supply-chain system and to conclude, “Oh well, I suppose it
is for the best, let’s leave it there,” would be both profoundly out of
character and profoundly destructive to our way of life. We do not, under any
circumstances, need to “learn to do without.”
It is fashionable in certain circles to
deride American “consumerism” as being in some way gauche. Indeed,
Schrager herself comes close to this when she complains that Americans have a
bad habit of buying “stuff we don’t really need.” But this is an argument that
makes sense only if we accept that other people — be they academics,
politicians, or columnists for Bloomberg — are in a better position to
determine what constitutes “stuff we don’t really need” than are individual
American citizens. In a free market, there is no such thing as “need”; there is
demand, and there is supply. Schrager praises America’s tendency to “come up
with new products and better ways of doing things,” but she implicitly narrows
her praise to those “products” and “things” of which she personally approves,
as if there exists a list somewhere at Harvard on which the iPhone has been
marked “Worthy” and Hot Pockets have been marked “Uncouth.” Certainly, I am
baffled by the way in which many Americans choose to spend their money, just as
I am baffled by people who have musical or gastronomical tastes that are
completely at odds with my own. But it’s a free country, and providing that
they aren’t hurting anyone, the private choices of other American consumers are
precisely none of my business. You have a buyer and a seller? Good luck to you.
Besides, the idea that our supply-chain
problems have affected only trinkets and trivialities is self-evidently false.
Americans could convene the most exquisite Council of Commercial Arbiters that
the world had ever seen, and task it with deciding what does and does not matter,
and even it would be hard-pressed to consider it a welcome development that, as
Schrager puts it, it now takes “months to find a car, refrigerator or sofa.” If
forced to, Americans could likely change a good deal about their way of life,
but, try as they might, they would not be able to make their country smaller or
colder, or to remove from its people the desire to sit down at home. A few
months ago, I was obliged to buy a new dishwasher, and, to my surprise, it took
six weeks before it was delivered. Am I supposed to glean some pleasure from
the knowledge that the same delays were hitting orders of other products that I
personally consider less essential?
Like others who complain about American
excess, Schrager seems to believe that one can meaningfully separate the parts
of the economy that are deemed worthwhile from the parts of the economy that
are not. (Or, at least, I hope she does, because if not her
conflation of “store shelves are emptying” and “we may need to learn to do
without” looks downright sinister.) But this, of course, is a pipe dream, given
that nobody can know ahead of time what Americans are likely to consider
essential and what they are likely to consider mere frivolity. It has long
seemed obvious to me that the reason the United States is better at inventing
“new products and better ways of doing things” than anywhere else is that is it
also better at inventing “junk” products that will be quickly forgotten. I do
not consider it an accident that the same country that invented the Frisbee
also invented drive-through banks and online shopping and Disney World and the
personal computer. When you encourage people to make and buy whatever they
want, it turns out that they . . . make and buy whatever they want.
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