Dorothy Canfield once said: “There just aren’t enough folks with sense to go around.” This was justification for her complaint of corruptive inefficiency and indolence that plagued all walks of life putting undue pressure on the small minority gifted with efficiency and diligence to supply the needs and comforts of the majority. The birth in a sense of supply-side economics. For it is only the entrepreneurs of good sense that are capable of creating demand from the hapless masses gullible and gadget prone. Never mind that Henry Ford cautioned it took a well-fed worker to buy his product.

Supply Siders think they dwell in a vacuum, not in an interdependent society. They do realize that to generate supply there must be temporary dehumanization of workers to get them to work as efficient, unthinking tools and browbeat them into mental weakness in order to ward off any semblance of survival, such as to organize with fellow workers. There is little wonder the trend is outsourcing to foreign labor or the continuance of sweatshops at home. For, the business mind still has confidence that Americans — primarily in service jobs that must stay within the borders — will continue to demand these goods since there are now far more of those with sense to go around, and those of the majority who lack the sense cannot resist debt in order to meet the ever volatile demands.


Seldom is the threat of a Depression on the minds of those with sense. They know of “irrational exuberance” in the stock market that creates a bubble burst, but they do not think the “irrational exuberance” of the consumer will have anything but profitable results. Let’s face it, although there are limits to the credit card, there are no limits to how many the consumer can obtain.


Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: January 27, 2004.