General Discussion

Once people have what they need to sustain their basic lifestyle they start to want things they perceive as being "nicer" or more desirable rather than basic necessities. And this is one of the problems of capitalism: to keep going it has to keep creating "needs": bigger houses, bigger vacations, bigger everything. I'm hardly blameless.

Doubthat (deliberate misspelling) and his ilk harken back to the days when people like them lived lives of leisure, with the time and ability to pontificate on what caught their fancies, while armies of newly arrived immigrants toiled for 60 hours a week in factories (pre-OSHA of course) and were happy to get the work because they thought it was a better deal than where they came from. But they seem to assume that those days will come back to the US, and Americans who grew up in the age of plenty will cheerfully go back to assembly line work.