Spending cash frivolously on luxuries is a big part of what capitalist societies are all about. There's no accounting for taste though, so unless you're an extraordinarily prudent consumer you'll likely have any numbers of hobbies or habits (often interchangable, depending on who you ask) yourself which require funding that may leave others "stunned".

I wanted to respond here because your sentiment sounds much like the old "capitalist swine" rhetoric of the old Soviet Union back in the 1950's and 1960's during the cold war. It's pretty amusing to see that kind of thought resurfacing today...:D

The difference between capitalism and socialism is simply this: capitalists decide to a much greater degree for themselves what is frivolous and what is not; socialists are told by their governments what is frivolous and what is not, and socialist governments tax their citizens to such a degree that continued government control of national "frivolity" is assurred in perpetuity...;)

In many socialist countries the only segment of the population rich enough to "spend cash frivolously on luxuries" is the government itself, and specifically the elite ruling class within that government, which is generally comprised in part of corrupt government bureaucrats who can amass much money for themselves through bribes and government-contract kickbacks, due to the amazing degree of concentrated economic power many of them hold in their respective socialist governments.

Adam Smith's economic postulate of the "guiding hand of self-interest" is not economic doctrine as much as it is a psychological observation applicable to the human species. We can make a slight change to a well-known maxim of Mark Twain's and come up with this:

"When I was 18 and a student, socialism sounded just so cool and seemed like the perfect answer for the world's ills; but when I turned 28 and was working 8-12 hours a day for my bread and butter, I discovered the frivolity of handing the government taxes amounting to 65%-75% of every dollar I earned, simply so that the government could make decisions as to how to spend most of the money I earn each day through my own labor. As I have come to see that I am a far wiser arbiter of my needs than ever the government will be, I am today a happy capitalist."



In capitalist countries an attempt is made to acknowledge the inherent self-interest in individual human psychology; in socialist countries an attempt is made to shift self-interest from the individual onto the abstract of "the government." The socialist model really doesn't work, of course, because "the government" is merely an abstract and the seat of human psychology is in reality the individual. In other words, human beings do not exist in hives and are not sentient through a hive mind, but always and only exist as individuals. Therefore, any economic system which treats human beings as "masses" or "groups" instead of individuals is destined to fail because it is founded upon a fundamental fiction.

In a few socialist countries, the tax rate is so high in myriad ways that little if any income is available to many individuals for much more than the basic necessities. But human self-interest does not vanish from the individual psyche just because the government appropriates it to itself through legislation, and in such countries corruption is rampant and black markets abound. In fact, some governments tax so highly and restrict individual economic freedoms to such a degree that you might actually be able to call them "benign slave states"--which basically enslave their populations through economic regulation and taxation, but do it under the propaganda banner of "the public good."

A recent example of the kinds of catastrophic and tragic failures that socialist governments can inflict on their people, an example particularly moving to me, is something that happened in France a couple of summers ago. In its "wisdom" some government bureaucrats in France at some point a few years ago decided that the concept of common air conditioning in people's homes was an evil they wanted to stamp out.

The decision in France to tax the sale of personal home air conditioners (cooling) beyond the reach of almost everyone in the country, but particularly the elderly, was made on the basis of pseudo-scientific political doctrine which asserts that home air-conditioning units (among other technologies) are destroying the ozone layer and will one day render the earth uninhabitable.

What happened a couple of summers ago in France as the result of such heavy-handed socialist regulation, is that a heat wave hit the country and more than ten thousand elderly residents died that summer in their homes from heat stroke.

From what I read *not a single one of them* had the home air conditioning (because they could not afford it due to the excessive taxation the French government had levied on the industry) that would have allowed them to ride out the heat wave in relative comfort and survive. 10,000 people is a large, large number of people, and by way of contrast it's many multiples of the total number of fatalities in all of the Iraq war to date. It was a tragedy, of course, and I do not mean by these remarks to politicize it--I just wanted to emphasize its dimensions, and to point out that this is the kind of thing which can happen when governments decide to "regulate" their economies through taxation on a scale common to socialist governments.

In reading the various reports of what happened in France I thought it was interesting to note that due to the lack of general building air conditioning throughout the *whole of France* there was actually difficulty in finding air-conditioned spaces of sufficient size where the bodies of these people could be held until notification of relatives and funeral arrangements could be made. Amazing to see something as barabaric as this in the 21st century.

This type of thing happens far more often in the so-called "progressive" socialist economies than it does in, for instance, the US where personal home air-conditioning is considered a common necessity, and where the government *subsidizes* low-income people, especially the elderly, who cannot otherwise afford it. Heat-stroke has killed the elderly in the US, too, but never, ever on the scale as recently happened in France--not even close--and the difference is that if an elderly person in the US has no air conditioning then it is most often the result of *individual economic choice* and *never* as the result of government taxation which *deliberately* prices the air conditioning so far out of his reach that even if he wants it he cannot afford to buy it. To me, there's only one word to describe France's policy towards things like personal home air conditioning--tyrannical.

Basically, I see that all governments have as great a responsibility to "protect" the lives of their *living citizens* to exactly the same degree, if not more, than their policies are designed to "protect" generations yet unborn. I do not see *any* value whatever in sacrificing 10,000+ elderly people *today* for the sake of questionable scientific data which may not even turn out to be true at all. That's madness. But hey, that's socialism, too, and in France home air-conditioning was ruled a "frivolous luxury" with little practical value, and 10,000+ elderly French citizens, grandmothers and grandfathers to many in France, I'm sure, paid for it with their lives.