Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television

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Thurow's point is that if the government, that is, the taxpayer, didn't pick up the slack which industrial growth has created, the widening gap between the rich and poor would be perfectly obvious. In the false belief that industrial growth will provide benefits to the poor and unemployed, we provide tax breaks to aid industrial growth. Meanwhile, with our own taxes, we feed the growing number of hungry and poor, who are blamed for the rising taxes. We pay for what is being taken away from us. At each turn of the cycle, the situation becomes more desperate.

What these figures reveal is that America is every bit as dominated and directed by a tiny minority of wealthy people as the Mexico and Nicaragua of my high school teacher's fantasy. Looking at the past thirty years through our new reality of unemployment lines, bankrupted small businesses, and the immense profits of a handful of corporate giants, we can see that we are now much further away from an egalitarian society than we were a generation ago. The American Dream was a dream.

Flaws in the Fantasy

Since the dream was packaged and sold by advertising people, it ought to be no surprise that the flaws in it were never mentioned. It is inherent in the advertising process to tell only those parts of the story that encourage the desired belief.

Two major flaws were covered over. The first was that commodity consumption and economic growth, even if beneficial, could not go on forever. The second was that economic flow in a private enterprise economy, during periods of rapid growth, is inexorably distorted to favor the rich.

Unlimited economic growth is a planetary impossibility. It could only have been conceived by minds out of touch with natural limits. It is dependent upon a suicidal overuse of resources and an impossible rate of commodity consumption. It depends upon all elements of the resource-production-consumption cycle operating at an accelerated rate that cannot be maintained in the long run.

At the initial signs of raw materials shortages, of which oil and copper were only the first, production began to decline, jobs were lost, buying power decreased, while, contrary to the textbook laws of supply and demand, prices went up. The handful of corporations that totally dominate supply were able to raise prices, getting more money from the ever-shrinking number of people who could afford to pay.

In addition, many of our client governments abroad, which had been paving our way to their resources, began to fall to revolutionary movements. This was particularly true in African, Asian, and Middle Eastern nations, bringing into view the bottom of the bottomless pit of goodies.

Meanwhile the limits of commodity consumption were appearing. People cannot buy two new cars every year forever. Nor can road builders keep building roads once the landscape is mostly covered. People cannot replace their living-room furnishings, microwave ovens or television sets annually, no matter how much advertising they see. Eventually, purchase rates slow down. There is an end to the consumption process. Markets can be overexploited.

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