How Economic Growth has Become Anti-Life

[AdHocSolver]

4. A better label for what is described is the commercialization of all of life's activities.

My dictionary defines commercialize as "to exploit for profit" and uses as an example "commercialize Christmas".

Corporations talk about their activities as "adding value" and "improving" the economy by increasing GDP.

However, in reality, they are wasting natural resources for profit, and ruining the environment at the same time.

For example, not very many years ago, people would buy a water bottle for a few dollars, and fill it with water from a water faucet for a few pennies. They could reuse that water bottle hundreds of times. This was environmentally friendly as well as a cost saving practice.

Then a "brilliant" marketer got the idea of putting water (often merely tap water) in plastic bottles, maybe adding some artificial coloring and flavoring, and selling it for a lot more than the cost of the contents and the container.

Besides separating people from a lot of their money (the cost of buying a new bottle each time they want some portable water), such a product is highly wasteful of natural resources, principally oil, and causes considerable environmental pollution.

The capitalist who profits from this waste claims that this is good for the economy because it increases GDP. However, when people with limited income are forced to spend limited resources in such a wasteful manner, the society as a whole suffers as in the example cited in the original post.

The epitome of capitalist thinking was expressed by one of my economics professors when he stated that natural disasters were considered good for the economy because it forced people to spend money to replace their losses.