However, that pricey pendant most assuredly does serve as a symbol of an unfortunate quirk in American buying habits. We are a nation that specializes in producing and consuming items that have little purpose except to facilitate extravagance, and it’s a proclivity that hardly begins or ends with jewelry. Millions of us insist on paying a great deal of money for goods that would cost little or nothing in a world where everything was ranked strictly by functionality.
Although bemoaning taxes is the true national pastime, the one tax nobody really considers is this “vanity tax”: the difference between what a thing needs to cost (to fulfill a given function) and what it ends up costing (after being artificially inflated by imperatives besides function).
Taxes are imposed by governments. Prices are determined by supply and demand. Mr. Salerno isn’t observing “a quirk in American buying habits.” He’s observing a most basic of economic laws, which are at their heart simply observations of human behavior. His eye, alas, is untrained in much more than jewelry. His subjective, haughty value judgments are worth less than that $39 Wal-Mart pendant, though he clearly wants his readers to think his judgment is more valuable than the $1195 pendant.
The real “quirk in American habits” is that we actually pay attention to the pontifications of those who are not only ignorant, but proud of that ignorance. The logical next step, of course, would be to impose his “functional” (which are really “Puritanical,” and not “practical” at all) values on everyone else. “Functionalists” like Mr. Salerno, of course, don’t care much for beauty, or wonder, or even truth. You know, those things that expose our true humanity.
If Mr. Salerno wants to restore what has been great about America, he ought not be asking solely the questions of East German bureaucrats. Let him take his dreary ideals someplace else.
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