After 50 years in Government Joe Biden, much like his party, doesn’t have any new ideas. And so, Ole Joe got the band back together and now he’s dutifully playing all the old hits, massaging all the Leftist erogenous zones in the same way The Stones belt out a carefully curated list of the same damned songs they’ve been playing for 60 years as the same fans, themselves in their 70’s now, sing along and sway back-and-forth and raise their hands as if at an outdoor Church revival.
I stumbled on this article this past weekend which talks about how, with the pandemic over, the rich are spending all the money they’ve saved over the last two years, and they’re doing so like a coked-out Naval Officer on Shore leave… they’re spending it, in other words, like Hunter Biden.
Reading the piece, which drips with disdain and tsk-tsk-ing and reads like battlespace prep for an upcoming Democrat Party talking point, I was reminded of that great Leftist bugaboo of the late 80’s… “Conspicuous Consumption” they called it. The term itself goes back a hundred years but I can clearly remember the Democrat Party using it to try and discredit the economic boom created by Reagan’s low tax and de-regulatory policies back in the late 80’s and well into the 90’s.
Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie WALL STREET was all about this relentless undead villain of the Uber Left, which proves that propaganda collaboration between Left Wing politicians and the Media goes back a long way. In the case of WALL STREET, Conspicuous Consumption is perfectly defined by Gekko’s insistence that Sheen try the Steak Tartar… it’s off the menu, which means there’s no way to find out how much it costs, because if you have to ask then you can’t afford it, and that’s the point. Or by the man-sized robot which seems to do nothing other than roll around the house with a tray of watered-down drinks. Or by the gun in Gekko’s beach house display case… “the rarest pistol in the world… only six of ’em were ever made”, dontcha know.
As Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox relentlessly pursues Gordon Gekko’s ostentatious lifestyle, we find him spending what must be six figures to have his girlfriend (played by Daryl Hannah) redesign the interior of his brand new million-dollar condo. There’s a great musical montage that accompanies her redesign which features Sheen wandering around the condo looking confused and slightly appalled but trying to keep a brave face for his girlfriend who, he hopes, must know what she’s doing. “That’s enough gold over there!” she shouts authoritatively, as if it’s possible to know exactly how much gold leaf is “too much.”
Later, running out of things to spend their money on, Sheen buys a complicated (and no doubt expensive) machine that does nothing except pump out tiny bricks of sticky rice upon which Sheen places rectangles of homemade Nigiri Sushi. He never seems to wonder if making the bricks by hand might have been easier and faster because being able to buy the machine that does it for him is the whole point.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with Conspicuous Consumption… you can’t take it with you, after all. And none of us should care what some rich dude we’ll never meet spends his money on. But as Sheen slowly becomes disenchanted with his meaningless highly-leveraged existence, and facing the truth of Gekko’s plans to break his father’s company down for spare parts, Sheen finally confronts his hero, who has become the enemy.
Sheen, it appears, has finally seen through to the evil at the heart of Conspicuous Consumption. “How many yachts can you water ski behind!?” he thunders.
Such a great line, but it’s also one that completely misses the point. Conspicuous Consumption is what creates good jobs, not Government policy. Politicians who want the economy and wages to grow should answer Sheen’s question with “as many as he wants.” Shipbuilding is a highly-skilled job with great pay… exactly the kind of jobs Democrats say they want Americans to have. Building ten super yachts creates a hell of a lot more jobs, and a lot more middle class Americans than building a single yacht does, and infinitely more than any Government program ever devised. But of course Shipbuilding doesn’t redress racial grievances, nor does it give Government control over more facets of our lives, nor does it take active steps to protect the environment… and so it doesn’t count.
Now, yes, Gekko was a bad guy. One totally comfortable with destroying jobs in one arena (Airlines or Paper Companies) even while he accidentally creates jobs in another (Yacht and Robot building). He’s also totally comfortable with lying, cheating, and stealing. But just because Gekko is a morally compromised man, that doesn’t make his Conspicuous Consumption inherently evil. And it doesn’t mean that he’s fundamentally wrong about the nature of greed, either. Conspicuous Consumption is not the problem… the things Gekko buys say nothing about his character. Gekko’s lack of morality is the real problem. And that’s something you can’t change with confiscatory tax policy.
But try they will.
Joe Biden, or whomever has his hand up the old puppet’s ass these days, isn’t dumb enough to start using stale thrity-year-old buzzwords like “Conspicuous Consumption” though, so I imagine they will rebrand it. Something evocative of the woke moment in which we find ourselves… call it “Inequitable Expenditures”… or something like that.
But sooner or later, Biden will face a stark choice. The economy is not doing what it should be doing and he knows it. He also knows, or should know, that things like $20,000 cruise ship cabins are giving us whatever economic growth we actually do have right now, which ain’t much. And he can only demonize the people who pay for those $20,000 cruise ship cabins for so long before he begins to do real damage to our already limping economy.
But that’s not going to be enough for the Moron Wing of the party, led by Bernie and AOC, who want those people stripped of their assets… and also their clothes… and maybe their heads, preferably in the public square and on Pay-Per-View, if it can be arranged.
It doesn’t matter to the tradesmen who build Gekko’s yachts how many he thinks he can water ski behind… the more the merrier they’d say. And it shouldn’t matter to the busybodies who make up the ascendant Hard Left either. But it does… and their inability to dictate the answers makes them sooooo mad.