‘Too much’ consumer choice? No (of course!).
Dominic Pino rightly takes Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to task for his comment, “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream,” a remark which, to be fair, Bessent immediately elaborated upon, saying:
“The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security.”
Well, yes.
Nevertheless, it is possible to detect in Bessent’s comments just a hint of disdain for people’s desire to get hold of stuff at a decent price, a faint echo of the ascetic’s tiresome belief that we have “too much,” that we are too materialistic, and so on.
This came up the other day in the context of a discussion as to whether there could be “too much” consumer choice.
Answer: No (of course!).
Matt Lau and I went over this here and here on Cap Matters.
I noted this:
There are worse things, after all, than a cornucopia, as the story of Boris Yeltsin at a Houston supermarket reminds us. In 2023, Scott Lincicome recalled how, in the course of a trip to the U.S. in 1989, Yeltsin went to see NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, but it was “a brief, impromptu visit to a nearby grocery store that may very well have changed world history,” by catalyzing his rejection of the Soviet economic model.
Turning to Bessent, Reason’s Liz Wolfe had this to say:
I’m not sure what Bessent thinks upward mobility means if not being able to more easily afford things that make people’s lives better, full of less labor and exertion, to be able to springboard oneself into a higher level of material comfort than before, and to not be bound by the class or circumstances into which one was born. It’s easy to decry “cheap goods” and conjure up images of random stupid crap purchased on Amazon — a materialism that seems hollow and unnecessary. But “cheap goods” means washing machines and dishwashers that free us from the drudgery of household chores; it means “the infinite supply of everyday items,” all the toothbrushes and nail clippers and pens and tennis balls and coffee mugs that keep our households running; it means cars and iPhones for people to be able to travel and communicate and stay connected more seamlessly than ever before. It’s the lack of “cheap goods” — lumber, steel, aluminum parts, and nails — that has driven our housing prices up to such an untenable degree (among other things).
Access to cheap goods is very much the essence of the American dream; it should never be taken for granted that we live in a time of extraordinary material abundance…
Joseph Schumpeter was right; now all the factory girls have gotten their stockings and we’re facing big questions of what to do next. Bessent appears to be selling short this modern miracle in service of promoting tariffs which will, in fact, make the American dream harder to achieve.
Factory girls? Schumpeter?
“It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elisabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort” — economist Joseph Schumpter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.
Amen.
That anticipates Andy Warhol:
What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.
From Warhol to Pino:
Cheap goods are absolutely a part of the American dream, for the same reason higher pay is part of the American dream: Both reduce prices on stuff people want to buy.
And on the topic of tariffs:
[G]ood luck explaining to people that they really should pay more because the government says so.