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Shopping makes the world go round: I know thrift is in and saving is good and paying all your debts and your mortgage off is, (hard to believe) the groovy thing to do. I am surrounded by people who do not shop, or at least take much pleasure in pinching every penny till it squeaks and then when they shop take an unseemly (possibly to the point of smugness) amount of pleasure in buying something because, as they say to me, they are solvent, implying that I am not -- since I'm not as virtuous as they and shop far, far too much. While I think -- and say sometimes in retaliation -- that Canada's entire problem is that no one shops nearly enough. Americans taught me how to shop, and about the sheer indecent pleasure that comes from buying something beautiful, and only glancingly necessary. And specifically by my ex-husband, who shopped for a living when I met him, and therefore dragged me through every store in North America and Europe over the seven or 10 years of our marriage, to the point where I found myself one sunny summer day (with seven years of higher education) sorting rags at a warehouse in Los Angeles because the best vintage was to be found there. The pleasure was indecent particularly for a Canadian WASP, heavily laced with Scots and grounded in actual Puritan stock, who had been trained from birth that you only buy certain things, like chintz upholstery and heavy brocade drapes, at certain times in your life. And plaid. From Ogilvy's. That you could buy at any time, because plaid, well, it defines worthiness. Of course, this pleasure and beauty does have massive implications for the good. Consumers kept us afloat during this last recession. Without shopping, therefore, we would be all looking forward to a very grim Christmas. Shopping makes it possible for retailers, manufacturers, and the host of people who bolster that sector, to send their kids to college, and improve their own lives, which means they shop more, and the puddle of solvent people expands geometrically again. No one in power in Ottawa understands that do they? Which is why, because of excessive taxation and regulation, our standard of living is two-thirds that of the States, slipping steadily over the past 10 years till we are now so clearly the poor cousins. Poor, hostile, mean-spirited cousins at that. The Alliance released a chart in the last election that showed the average, mean-income, middle-class couple with two kids had a negative disposable income. This meant they had to borrow (not much, but still) to make it through every year. This - - in this time of such abundance in this country of abundance -- is a crime and should be seen as such. And now two more vast statist initiatives will be cast in bronze by the middle of next year, and all of us will be hauling an even heavier load, our task made bitter by the fact that a) neither Kyoto or b) the extra $15-billion washed through Ottawa for health care is necessary. Our economy, turgid by comparison with our neighbours to the South -- I know this because I shop online and all the good stuff is to be found south of the border -- will slow to constipation, and the only people with any freedom or mobility will be those with the legal right to pick our pocket. And there still aren't enough of them to keep us growing. Course when there are, Canada will be like Soviet Russia, where no one at all could shop. What is it about Canada, I wonder, that we can't let ourselves go, and grow? We are, by inheritance of the land, the richest people in the world. Why aren't we the most innovative, the ones who give the world the most hope? Why do we embrace so much regulation? Why do we seek to restrict the activities of our fellow man? Is it a kind of hatred? Or jealousy? A kind of penalty? Surely time is long past when we thought you had to be white and from the right family with the right connections to be successful, and so the marketplace of employment had to be re-jigged. No one sane believes that anymore, there is too much evidence to the contrary. There is something tight and crabbed about us, that we don't let ourselves be all we could be. There are too many of us who think, like the crew at Kalle Lasn's Adbusters, that everything our markets produce is evil, and that people are sheep who cannot govern their own actions. This, like the persistent lies and exaggerations about the environment sent out by the many unscrupulous outfits that claim to "save" trees and things, forms the backdrop of our lives. It's simple. Growth is good. Spending is good. Shopping is good. Everyone in the Third World wants to be like us and the only way to help them is to drop all tariffs and to help them recreate our system in their own countries. There are private-market solutions to every single environmental concern, and if you send me $20 and a problem I'll point you to the company that can solve it. A robust economy encourages energetic, ambitious people to take a flier, not to leave for the States. We don't need hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats to micro-manage every aspect of our lives. Last Friday was Black Friday, traditionally the day where retailers finally go into the black, which means that all their profits are made in December. Which means at Christmas time, hope for millions of families is created anew. Shopping/December/ Christmas. Why do you think these things are connected? Because shopping is divine.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.