...commercial culture taints everything, marginalizing family life, religious life, civic life, and reducing citizens to mere consumers whose private market choices give them what they want, but fail to give them what they want to want: a Benjamin Barber-style "strong" democracy in which we may need to be "forced to be free."

The argument of Consumed rests the false assumption that capitalism, in its contemporary incarnation, is in some sense overproductive. "Too many unprofitable products chase too few consumers, too many of whom must be prodded, pushed, and cajoled into consumption," Barber writes, citing journalist William Greider's One World, Ready or Not (p. 45). Barber accuses boosters of dynamic, free-market economies as having failed to grasp that the modern economy decreasingly manufactures goods to meet "real needs" and increasingly manufactures "needs to address and absorb the commodity and service surpluses of overproduction." (p. 45)

How Barber knows this to be fact--which would be the biggest social scientific scoop of the century--is left to the reader to piece together from Barber's hand-waving assertions and hyperventilating anecdotes. Of course, a well-confirmed proposition in economics known as Say's Law tells us that in a regime of freely moving prices and capital, long-run overproduction is exceedingly improbable, if not literally impossible.

Barber, who does not appear to understand how the markets he criticizes actually function, probably does not intend to say that goods are rolling off the line simply to rust in warehouses. The problem, as he sees it, is...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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