When your faithful 'Dlogger dies, he wants to go wherever John Kenneth Galbraith is. And if economic opinions play any meaningful role in deciding where one ends up, this prospect seems reasonably secure. For other than the latter's tendency to pick on comic books as prime examples of Man's obsession with trifles, they pretty much see eye-to-eye.
For comic books, pistachio ice cream, and Gilbert & Sullivan are all assuagers of manufactured needs (your 'Dlogger admits this; it is Galbraith's high-horseplay with respect to comic books with which your 'Dlogger takes issue). That is, these trifles provide people with things to aspire to, things to desire, things to work and make money for, and spend that money for, so that others can make and spend money, and on and on. They are not like food, air, and warmth, which are essentials we need in order to propagate. They are things we like, and things people can work on since we have enough people who grow food and build shelters.
Here is the problem, says Galbraith: there is nothing wrong with the production and consumption of all these unnecessary things; the problem is that when demand is insufficient for them, people suffer. There is nothing inherently abnormal about insufficient demand for - what shall your faithful 'Dlogger pick on? - fabric softener. But some people's well-being depends on money made selling the stuff, so when people cut back, fabric softeners get laid off, demand drops further, and a vicious cycle begins. In The Affluent Society, page 217-8 Fortieth Anniversary Edition, Galbraith likens our situation to
a factory which must be operated at top speed for three shifts and seven days a week even at some risk of eventual breakdown, not because the product is in demand . . . but because any lower rate of operation will leave some of the people in town without a livelihood.
The Affluent Society was first published in 1958. The chapter from which the above was quoted is called The Divorce of Production from Security, an idea that enchants your faithful 'Dlogger. Can we run the factory at a lower speed without subjecting ourselves to privation? Can we make less of the stuff we do not explicitly need, while keeping ourselves well fed and sheltered? In 1958 Galbraith seemed to think so, and by 1998 presumably he was not so disillusioned that he felt the need to remove the idea from his book's new edition.
But in The Good Society, first edition 1996, page 24, Galbraith writes that even the society to which he aspires (to say nothing of the one we have)
must have substantial and reliable economic growth - a substantial and reliable increase in production and employment from year to year.
It is unclear whether between 1958 and 1996 he gave up on the idea of divorcing production from security. But, ominously, on page 3, ibid., he writes:
In all the industrial countries, there is the firm commitment to the consumer economy - to consumer goods and services - as the primary source of human satisfaction and enjoyment. . . . There is also the even more urgent need for the income that comes from production. In the modern economy . . . production is now more necessary for the employment it provides than for the goods and services it supplies.
Any useful identification of the good society must therefore take into consideration the institutional structure and the human characteristics that are fixed, immutable. They make the difference between the utopian and the achievable. . . .
Galbraith here seems to dismiss the idea that we can rid ourselves of the need to produce things in order to keep ourselves happy and healthy. So that even though we may only strictly need what farmers and a few others produce, by God, the rest of us had better find something to do and someone to pay for it or we are going to die in the gutter.
Your faithful 'Dlogger's idea for
a new power plant is, arguably, a step towards cranking down our factory's conveyor belt speed. That is, it is a suggestion that although we
can produce energy more quickly and efficiently - through burning fossil fuels or with nuclear power - it would be socially advantageous to produce energy using stationary bicycles. Though less efficient and therefore inconceivable in a libertarian economy, this production source could compete with conventional energy if supported sufficiently by the state. Offsetting the tax money withdrawn from the economy would be the paychecks disbursed to the producers, most of which would likely be spent on consumable goods.
Is this a pipe dream? Isn't it analogous to publicly funded police forces that forbid the physically strongest among us from efficiently taking by force whatever they would like from their weaker neighbors? Isn't the reason we have the factory supporting us at all that we draw a line between the easiest way to do something and the way we could do it that would maximize human happiness? And isn't that the ultimate goal?
