After the scary week on Wall Street, Just Thomism gives me some pause with this:
It’s humiliating to notice the degree to which I’ve at least taken part in the kind of avarice that is commonplace in American life. I’m buried in a mountain of junk I never needed, I eat kinds of food and amounts of food at every meal that my parents and grandparents would have been happy to eat at a meal once a month, I think nothing of buying beverages for embarrassingly high prices, my kids have a floor full of useless junk that bores them, my family buys more clothes in a year than most middle class persons fifty years ago would have owned in a lifetime. Some portion of this is real prosperity and economic boom- but I have the nagging feeling that most of this is made possible by a vast, phantom economy that is simply not there.