The Wealth Illusion Of Cheap
Why we vote for our own destruction
I was going to call this article the trap of the cheap but I think wealth illusion covers it more succinctly. Over the last three decades we have been inundated with cheap goods from places like China, India, Indonesia and the Far East. Goods such as cheap clothes, cheap TVs, cheap cars, cheap furniture and even cheap shoes. Every kind of consumable you can imagine has been delivered to the West to satiate the demand of a population trained to consume. Add to this is the cheapening of food production with intensive agribusiness foisting ever more exotic produce onto a humanity determined to make obesity a positive goal in life. Every country on the planet has been dragged into this intensive food production to make a seemingly endless supply piled up on the supermarket shelves.
All of life has become one great bargain and we went out and bought it.
The upshot of all this consumption however has created a mentality that I like to call kingship. We all expect to live like kings. We have the illusion that we can afford our every whim and we can even afford to waste food and goods without any guilt. This has meant that the definition of poverty in the West is now almost nonsensical. Real poverty is reserved for third world countries living on the borders of…
