National Review 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.
That might not actually be a bad thing.
