In the twentieth century, there has been a growing influence of irrationalist philosophy, which denies the reliability and efficacy of human reason and which disregards the profound influence that the possession of reason exerts on every aspect of human life. According to such philosophy, there is little to distinguish man from the lower animals. Indeed, as we have seen, man is depicted as “the trousered ape”; porpoises, it is asserted, may possess intelligence comparable to man’s; snail darters, we are told, have equal rights with man. Thus, at bottom, man, it is held, is just another animal. On such a view of man, it follows that man’s needs and desires must be as limited as those of an animal and thus fundamentally incapable of extending beyond the range of minimum necessities. The fact that man’s desires obviously do extend beyond the range of an animal’s is held to be the result of “social and cultural conditioning” and the work of advertisers; at the same time, the desires are denounced as “unnatural,” “artificial,” and “created.” Thus, the basic economic premise is advanced that the need and desire to consume are essentially fixed and given, and that the ability to produce threatens constantly to outrun them.
This premise, together with its leading implications, I call
consumptionism. It is the doctrine that the fundamental problem of economic life is how to increase the need and desire to consume in the face of an ability to produce that exceeds them. Consumptionism proceeds as though the problem of economic life were not the production of wealth, but the production of
consumption.
The consumptionist premise must be characterized as nothing less than the premise of
anti-economics. This is because, as we shall see, point by point, it leads to a total inversion of the conclusions of sound, rational economic science.
--George Reisman,
Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Laguna Hills, CA: TJS Books, 1998), 543.
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