How disciplined are you?
Are you able to buy only what you need?
Or do you have absolutely no willpower whatsoever when it comes to the advertisements you see and the blitz of marketing you are assaulted with for products and services that are mostly not essential to your daily existence?
What happens when you make the conscious decision to only purchase what it is you actually need?
You demonstrate the capacity to change everything as we know it about how we came to be buried under the global economic thumb of emerging manufacturing nations.
The United States economy is largely based on consumption.
Going all the way back to Bill Clinton and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), we offshored our manufacturing and opened up our markets internationally in the name of increased buying power and economic prosperity for not only the United States, but the world at large, too.
We were going to continue to have the world’s leading economy, but instead of actually making anything, we were just going to shift that elsewhere and consume our way to continued number one economic power status, with abundant, inexpensive goods and services made in now-economic superpower China.
China and all the other countries besides the United States who took up manufacturing were counting on Americans in their pharmaceutical-induced haze, to play this dangerous game, too.
We gave up control of our destiny when we shifted manufacturing to places other than the good old US of A.
It was supposed to be good.
It was described as a win-win for everyone.
But it hasn’t worked. America no longer innovates. The emerging nations that have taken up the manufacturing base are the ones who are innovating—we can only at best contract with them to offer what it is they are innovating, as sadly, we are no longer capable of doing so.
We never had a model for the global economy when we let our politicians compromise our way of life. If this complete shift in how we live had historical precedent, we surely would have at least questioned their steering us towards it.
But, lacking this example, we simply listened and complied with their message when they told us that this was really the way to go—we’d trade our manufacturing-based economy for a service based one, we’d still have plentiful jobs and our choice of inexpensive, readily available, consumer electronics. They excitedly expressed all this to us like the good sales people they were, and we bought it hook, line and sinker.
Boy, did we ever let them stick it to us.
To be fair, we never really stood a chance against them, though. Politicians are sales people. They try to sell us something and we all too often are buying what they are selling.
America is the most addicted country in the world. We enjoy any pill imaginable that big pharmaceutical companies prescribe for us, for any ailment imaginable. If we aren’t feeling well, we can be given a pill that will take care of it.
Sometimes a shiny new piece of technology is the pill that makes us feel better.
Occasionally, we see on television that if we eat at a certain establishment regularly, or order a certain entrée on special, the good times will almost certainly, really start rolling!
Now we’re signing up in droves to be marketed to on our smart phones, too.
The global economy has seen marketing advances in quantities, levels and places never previously approached in recorded history. We are blitzed with advertisements on TV.
Our computers need to be powerful in order to endure the amount of flash animation and advertising that must be clicked past in order to get the information we’re looking for. This includes, ironically enough, the online version of print media newspapers that pretty much render them impossible to navigate without a beefed up machine.
The overall end to this predicament is nowhere in sight, though, no matter what interpretation of the Mayan calendar you subscribe to.
There may be no going back in terms of globalization.
But you can start to change everything for the better by only purchasing what you need.
Can you do that?
