96 How Much Should a Country Consume? 



least expressed its concern — it would obviously be better to risk stag- 

 nation now than to use up our reserves and have not stagnation but 

 absolute contraction later on. Those who sanctify growth but also say 

 that the resource position is serious are, in effect, arguing that we 

 have no alternative to having our fling now even though, more or less 

 literally, there is hell to pay later on. This is an odd posture for the 

 conservationist. 



It is also suggested that uninhibited consumption has something to 

 do with individual liberty. If we begin interfering with consumption, 

 we shall be abridging a basic freedom. 



I shan't dwell long on this. That we make such points is part of the 

 desolate modern tendency to turn the discussion of all questions, how- 

 ever simple and forthright, into a search for violation of some arcane 

 principle, or to evade and suffocate common sense by verbose, inco- 

 herent, and irrelevant moralizing. Freedom is not much concerned 

 with tail fins or even with automobiles. Those who argue that it is 

 identified with the greatest possible range of choice of consumers' 

 goods are only confessing their exceedingly simple-minded and me- 

 chanical view of man and his liberties. 



In any case, one must ask the same question as concerns growth. If 

 the resource problem is serious, then the price of a wide choice now 

 is a sharply constricted choice later on. Surely even those who adhere 

 to the biggest supermarket theory of liberty would agree that their 

 concept has a time dimension. 



Finally it will be said that there is nothing that can be done about 

 consumption. This of course is nonsense. There is a wide range of 

 instruments of social control. Taxation; specific prohibitions on waste- 

 ful products, uses, or practices; educational and other hortatory efforts; 

 subsidies to encourage consumption of cheaper and more plentiful 

 substitutes are all available. Most have been used in past periods of 

 urgency. 



And here, indeed, is the first reason we do not care to contemplate 

 such measures. The latter forties and the fifties in the United States 

 were marked by what we must now recognize as a massive conserva- 

 tive reaction to the idea of enlarged social guidance and control of 

 economic activity. This was partly, no doubt, based on a desire to 

 have done with the wartime apparatus of control. In part, it was a 



