Supply and Demand

I was listening to another grim report on the economy the other day.  The economy, I heard, is pretty good, but the number of jobs just isn’t growing. People don’t have confidence, they say, so they aren’t buying stuff. And if they don’t buy stuff, there isn’t a need for people to manufacture stuff. I have often thought in the past many months that maybe people are smarter than they were before the financial crisis hit four years ago. Could it be that people are actually choosing not to buy all that unnecessary stuff that they deemed so important before the recession? I think this is a good thing. I shows maturity.

I vaguely remember some time during my education learning about the difference between an economic system based on demand and supply versus one based on supply and demand. The former is when material is produced according to what people actually need or want. The latter is based on material being produced and then having to create a market for those materials. Our American system ended up going for the latter. So you have all these companies making stuff and spending billions on advertizing to convince people that they need whatever it is they are producing. If they already have said item, then, they are told, they need a better, bigger, fancier version of it.

I wonder what would happen if it became the will of the American people to actually have a demand and supply economic system? It might look exactly like what is happening right now. Of course, if folks don’t start buying stuff, we will have to find a different way for people to be able to make money to provide for their needs and the needs of their families. Well, hey! If folks didn’t need to buy so much stuff, maybe they wouldn’t need so much money to begin with and people might manage just fine with part time work. If all full time jobs suddenly became half-time jobs, twice as many people could be employed.

Anybody want to run on this platform?