Go to War
There is a persistent myth that war is good for the economy; this makes no sense. War can be made good for an individual economy if it can pay for itself (the plan for Iraq before oil sabotage), however, the net result of war for all involved is always tremendous waste. We are fully employed, but with reduced total human work-force. We’re being productive, but the things we produce are used to destroy and are ultimately destroyed themselves. If this was good for the economy, it’d be just as good to use full employment to build a brand-new city, then bomb it to oblivion with home-made bombs, and then start the whole process over again. Seen in this light, it’s obvious that war can only be a tremendous and terrible waste in every sense.
The chief example people use to show war benefiting an economy is the US’s economy before, during, and after WWII. The war did coincide with the end of the Great Depression, but that was because of the disastrous state of affairs in Europe, which led to increasing demands for US exports in the beginning stages of the war. This is what took the US out of the depression; the war itself was a lean time of rationing and living scarcely. The US came out of WWII wealthy and powerful because it joined the war late, the war was fought elsewhere, and almost every other western industrial power had been reduced to ashes.
Litigate
Litigation is often compared to war, and for good reason. Like war, litigation arises out of a dispute which words were unable to resolve (in political meetings and settlement discussions, respectively). Like war, litigation can ultimately be very profitable to one of the parties. And like war, litigation is prohibitively expensive to both parties, leaving the two parties together ultimately worse off than they were before (and the lawyers and politicians with the spoils).
Litigation is ultimately unproductive: lawyers are paid handsomely for work that is often damaging economically (litigation costs go to a product or service’s overhead, making the product more expensive and the productive process less economically efficient). If lawsuits are filed only to address legitimate grievances when there is a real chance of prevailing, the costs are usually outweighed by the benefits. If, however, lawsuits are indiscriminately filed for the sake of profiteering or the legal process is abused for any other short-sighted interest, lawyering can become a cancerous growth on the economy, taking in resources at the ultimate expense of the whole.
Spend Alot on Advertising
In the good old days of economic simplicity, competing companies had two basic ways to out-do one another: quality and price. Together these two variable determine how much “value” you get for a product, how much quality per dollar, so to speak (this is an over-simplification, as is all theorizing). Marketing adds in a third variable, “image.” Money spent on a product’s image increases the overhead but doesn’t improve the product, therefore reducing its overall value. Notwithstanding this drop in value, large companies can squeeze out smaller ones with aggressive marketing campaigns which absorb a large percentage of the market share. (marketing is expensive so it automatically favors larger firms)
Beer provides an excellent example: would there be many Budweiser drinkers if Bud was just another tap at the bar? It’s over-carbonated swill, and there are much better cheap beers. But Budweiser sprays its logo over the landscape, in every bar window and all over TV (especially sports). How could it not have a dominant market share after all that advertising?
Advertising is like war; companies vie for the market’s attention as if it was enemy territory. In the meantime, people are manipulated into buying a product they might not have otherwise bought, further distorting the price/quality competition away from small companies and encouraging the propaganda-mindset of the people exposed to these messages. So you can see how advertising can be very damaging.
Redemption?
The difference between advertising on one hand and litigation and war on the other is that it’s possible for both war and litigation to have net positive effects. War is a part of the eternal process of creation and destruction, an aweful expression of nature’s brutality and a demonstration that “reasonableness” is mankind’s second law: necessity is the first. In a situation, for example, where there are limited resources with which to sustain a population, war’s destruction automatically becomes the deus ex machina by which the intractable problem of an overshoot growth solves itself (disclaimer:don’t shoot the messanger. I didn’t cause the problems, I just point them out).
Advertising, on the other hand, has no such possibility of a beneficial effect. Advertisers and marketers are fat ticks on the economy, taking lucrative paychecks for their work of distorting economic realities and helping to enslave us notorioiusly habitual humans to products and services for which we have no need. This contributes to the mega-sizing of the USA’s economic entities by favoring larger companies. Nothing is gained by any of this.
The more focused we are on image instead of substance and on waste instead of production, the less likely we are to recover from the current economic disaster without major suffering.