Amy’s Kitchen, a case-study in the problems with consumerism

You are not an ambulatory wallet.

As theories of change go, consumerism has a lot going for it. “Voting with your dollars” cuts out the middleman: rather than voting for a politician and hoping that they do the right thing, you can just reward good companies directly by buying their products (and punish bad companies by not buying their products).

But voting with your dollars has some obvious deficits. The first one is that you can’t shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. If you don’t like how Walmart’s predatory pricing and fat tax breaks let it drive every business in town out of business, you’re stuck. After all, every other business in town went bust, and you still need stuff.

The next one is that dollars are not evenly distributed. In a country where most Americans can’t afford a $400 medical emergency, the flow of dollars to a business is no marker of democratic legitimacy. A million normies can boycott a business but if a billionaire shops there, their “votes” are washed away.

There’s another defect, though, that’s a little less obvious. When you stop voting with your ballots and start voting with your dollars, then the companies that get your dollars can capture your political representatives (this is even easier if the company has a…