Radley Balko forcefully critiques those who harp too much on prosperity’s discontents, in particular focusing on those people who are making much of our supposed obesity, general unhappiness, and frustration flowing from having too many choices. Some closing paragraphs, which are perhaps a titch hyperbolic but still pretty sensible:
We don’t need to slow the engines of capitalism down, we need to ratchet them up, so their drippings reach places like Chad, Nigeria and Cambodia. It would be awfully selfish of us to deny the third world the fruits of our development simply because we’re bored with the excesses of comfort. We need more production, coupled with wide-open trade, to bring the burdens of wealth articulated by the free market’s wet blankets to the people who long to bear them.
We should strive to saddle women who scavenge city dumps in Cambodia and fistulas sufferers abandoned for coyotes in Niger with the tyranny of mustard, the frustration of rush hour gridlock, and the aggravation of spam email. We ought to work to make Bangladeshi parents agonize over putting their hyperactive sons on Ritalin. We ought to see how many Malaysians we can get addicted to Paxil, and Papua New Guinean housewives to Valium.
When the critics of capitalism are reduced to mining the suburbs for languor and tedium, when consumers in market economies gripe not about scarcity or pollution, but about too many ketchups and self-check grocery aisles, perhaps it’s safe to say that free-marketeers may finally have the central planners on the ropes.
Let’s see how long we can keep them there, and how many of the world’s poor we can infect with the afflictions of prosperity while we’re at it.
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