The Political Economy of Discretionary Spending

Consumer discretionary spending is what separates the average/common worker from the slave. Luxury goods provide a sense of financial power. A meaningful expression of their departure from powerlessness, and by implication, anxiety.

Consumer staple goods provide us with the basics in exchange for our labour. These luxury goods need not be decadent or flamboyant. They only need be better than the things they had access to prior. They need not be regarded as a objective status symbol with universal appeal or regard. A small or modest improvement is a simple yet effective means to make decisive statements regarding ones distance from anxiety, and migration towards power of the economic or financial kind.

What this means is that when blunt financial instruments like monetary policy (enacted upon the masses through interest rates) is used to constrain the incomes and discretionary spending power of the most economically exposed to those instruments (like young working class families), the net result is a return to indentured, or slave, labour. From a power perspective, this is the ruling elites, easily among them the political, the financial, the ecclesiastic, are dramatically draining the financial power away from the subjugated masses. They are having their access to financial power turned off. Their access to luxury goods constrained, and their ability to telegraph their movement away from the anxiety at our core.

This could, and probably should be, regarded as quite a destabilising and, necessarily, risky move to make. From Bertrand Russell’s perspective, this could very well set in motion the conditions to transition from traditional political power, widely regarded as culturally legitimate, to the illegitimate naked political power. And open itself to the woes and worries associated with the problems that the unstable political power context that brings.