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Stores sell us things we want at prices we like. So the real problem is … we
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John Robson Businesses stock what consumers want, and in Canada, that seems to be a lot of cheap, made-in-China products, writes John Robson. Photo by Peter J. Thompson / National Post Post content
So I see where my colleague Kelly McParland spent a year trying not to buy anything from Red China and ended up owning nothing and being happy. I’m a little jealous because I’m here for the long haul so I don’t own a breadbox but every time I forget to check something sneaks up like my new Microsoft keyboard. Yet if you wonder why Amazon is in cahoots with Xi Jinping, I wonder why we are.
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I remember back in the 1970s business was supposed to take over the world. And not in a good way. The coup in Chile was AT&T pulling the strings of the puppet from Nixon, Guatemala, it was United Fruit pulling those from Eisenhower, and the publicity was taking hold of your so-called mind.
Some thought that multinationals were supplanting governments, others just pretended to buy them. Which was more plausible because, as James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg put it in The Great Reckoning, the aggressor who sold the gun to his victim “failed to grab something crucial – that the almighty dollar is not almighty, it is always hostage to the might of the weapon.
The great corporate takeover was a hallmark paranoia of the left, brushing aside practical difficulties and instead driving out “great wealth evildoers” or some other sinister form of “power”. But always in the wrong place because, as Mao said, “political power is born from the barrel of a firearm”.
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Every time I forget to check something sneaks up
Amazon, Home Depot, and Walmart don’t sell Chinese goods because they are plotting to help Communists take over the world. They do it because they are not conspiring at all. They sell us things we want at prices we like. So the real problem is… oh my God… us.
We decide whether the restaurants sell healthy or large food, have practical clothes or fashionable trash, or sell Guangzhou animal fountains. This is called “consumer sovereignty” and it works. As Joseph Schumpeter wrote: “The image of the prettiest girl who ever lived will prove in the long run to be powerless in sustaining the sales of a bad cigarette.
As you might have guessed, this is an old example, dating back to 1942. Not because no one would sell that way today, but because when the politicians plastered pictures of gum disease on the girl, “Big Tobacco” was powerless to stop him.
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It’s a handy meme for conspirators. Big tobacco. Big Oil. Big bad wolf. Or a recent satirical article on the energy crisis of the 1970s produced by “Big Cardigan”. But businesses don’t thrive because of John Kenneth Galbraith’s grim view of shaping our desires through scientific manipulation at the Rand Corporation that would shame Fu Manchu. They thrive because they sell what we want.
Kelly McParland: My Year Without Buying Things In China John Robson: There Is Value In A Diplomatic Boycott of the Olympics
Lenin found it ironic that “the capitalists are selling us the rope with which we will hang them.” Others think it’s ironic that his most famous quote certainly doesn’t come from him. But there is no paradox.
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Nor does it reflect an appalling desire on the part of “companies” to do anything for money. Many companies, large and small, succeed precisely because of a principled position on what they sell, how they make it, where they donate, how they treat staff, etc. But in a free economy, a hundred flowers bloom, from organized progressivism to laissez-‘er-rip vulgarity. And there is always the risk that your principled lifestyle will turn out to be pretentious or hypocritical because the business is pretending. Where you are.
Commercial people are no less prone to the vices of false vanity than anyone else. But they’re much more disciplined than, say, politicians, because if people don’t buy the product, for some reason, the business fails. This is where things get very uncomfortable.
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No, not for them. Firing workers is painful and bad publicity (ask Better.com) while losing your shirt has obvious drawbacks. But the really major filter in trading is not what they are willing to do but who we are. We fill the shelves with our purchases. As Tom Hanks cried in The Burbs, we are the fools. And the vulgar. And those who would do anything for money, including shopping in a predatory Communist hell.
I do not strike frugality. Or condemn you for choosing gifts from China under the tree rather than no gifts at all. Heck, the lights were on there too. I’m surprised the tree wasn’t… and if it’s fake, it probably was. I just noticed that the mug I’m drinking from was “made for” Starbucks in Seattle. Do you want to guess where?
Of course, Chinese mugs may not be dishwasher or microwave safe, even though they claim to be. The culture of fraud and greed under militant socialism is far more savage and shameless than anything here. But don’t blame the companies. Even Alibaba can’t resist Xi Jinping’s whims. Or ours.
So if you don’t like forced labor, pollution, and Communist aggression, then don’t point your finger at Big Box. Act rather than talk.
National post
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