Thursday, December 01, 2005

The Over-consuming Capitalist

We live in the age of consumerism, where new products meet new needs in new ways every day. We have computers with Internet-access, mobile telephones, iPods, mp3-players in trendy city-cars or four-wheel driving monster-jeeps, bleached hair, leather-jackets, flashy espresso-machines, flat-screen plasma televisions and so on and so on. We are drowning in money-spending options in almost every field and suffocating in consumption of things and stuff that has nothing to do with basic survival, and thank god for that!

But the hyper-consumption and variety of options has its limits. We can, on the average, not chose too many ways of medical treatment, education or ways of helping the poor and helpless. The government has taken the role of supervisor over our health, education and basic upbringing. The result is that no-one complains over "too many hospitals" or "too much education" or "too few people to help". In the areas of State-control, the general rule is a lack of options, as opposed to hyper-consumption on the free market.

And isn't that worth thinking about?