On the Soapbox

How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? [...] They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles [...] of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden. [source]

This excerpt was from Adam Smith's 1759 The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Part IV, Chapter I. Smith also goes on to discuss what economists today call positional goods, with a description of how people will, in a vain attempt to rise above others, seek material goods, but since everyone seeks to do so, people are trapped on a treadmill of seeking more consumption in pursuit of a happiness that they think that they will attain but never do:

For this purpose he makes his court to all mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises. Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquility that is at all times in his power, and which, if in the extremity of old age he should at last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable to that humble security and contentment which he had abandoned for it.

Free market capitalism is just a system of the distribution of limited resources through an organic, decentralized mechanism founded on the principle of individual freedom. It is a pity that today, the noble banner of free market capitalism has been subverted and has become that under which the perversions of hyper-materialism operate.

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PS: Materialism has been so strongly associated with free markets and anti-materialism with socialism, that many would be surprised that it is Adam Smith, not Karl Marx, who wrote the passages quoted above.