Occum's Disposable Razor

Even the most ardent supporters of unfettered capitalism will concede that it fails to provide for any kind of structured growth. Planning beyond the next fiscal event horizon is impossible - but all of the shareholders fawn over the hockey-stick profitability chart, a totem of the future.

What has started to alarm me, as someone who believes in the free market, is how it has become easier almost too easy to build things anew. Instead of renovating an old house, instead of buying up the vacant strip-mall it's more attractive (in terms of capitalization) to build entirely fresh structures down the road. Pity any sucker who buys a home in a spanking-new sub-development and then is forced to sell it immediately for job or family reasons. Why buy the barely-used property when a new house is sprouting up next door?

The simplest explanation might be the most credible: It doesn't take a Nobel laureate economist to figure out that we aren't living in an investment-based market when everything becomes disposable, when each major acquisition drops precipitously in value like a new automobile the second it's driven off the lot. And call me a clueless hippie, but aren’t there also aesthetic and even spiritual concerns? What does this mentality do to people? We’re all on a one-way trip. Don’t we hope to get better as we get older and see our investments (economic and emotional) grow in value over time?

Sensing, perhaps, that their new world seems a little flimsy, the local government in Mason, one of Cincinnati's booming outlying areas, is thinking about ways to mask the ill effects of hyper-growth. This article notes how mom-and-pop stores are nonexistent in this vast expanse of exurbia and "big box" stores dominate the landscape. So the officials are considering "limiting parking lots and doing away with large logos", as well as asking them to cover up the unsightly HVAC systems that stick up from the rooftops.

This is hardly an investment in the future - but a worried nod to a crass economic reality that is already posed to start again and again twenty miles up the road.