Buy now, pay later: why buying more stuff now won't help us build a more stable future. (margin notes).

WHEN DOROTHY'S LITTLE DOG REVEALED the man behind the curtain, he at least had the decency to be embarrassed. Our modern economic wizards don't appear to care that their curtain has been pulled open. Most of them are yanking it apart themselves. In commercials running since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, buying a new car is proposed as a patriotic duty. Even before the markets collapsed in the aftermath of the carnage in New York and Washington, politicians spoke in grave tones about improving consumer confidence, and the media punditry simply went off the deep end, begging, then demanding that consumers get out and buy something, anything.

We are bombarded with the message that it is up to American consumers to prevent the economy from sliding into disaster. How? By buying things they may not particularly need, even want. How best can we respond to a cruel assault from people "who hate our way of life"? Fly somewhere and prop up the ailing airline industry.

Owing to a perhaps inevitable economic slowdown after more than a decade of unprecedented prosperity and the dreadful events of September 11, the United States--most of the capitalist world in fact--is drifting into a recession. Some fear the economic decline could become even more gruesome, leading to the first depression of the new century.

The rise and fall of the business cycle is hardly a new phenomenon, and the problems of capitalist overaccumulation are well known to any Econ 101 student. What seems new is the eagerness of the. American political and corporate establishment to make such a noisy distress call on behalf of capitalism. In the past, such folks were reluctant to let on that there might be such glaring design flaws in the West's economic infrastructure. Now, climbing onto the exercise wheel of materialism is prescribed as the answer to the national malaise, and capitalism--previously described in sturdy rationalist terms that emphasized its invulnerable and inevitable qualities--appears more as a vast but goofy pyramid scheme than a reasonable way of ordering our society.

Perhaps subtlety and obfuscation are no longer viewed as required defenses against the skepticism, even resistance, of the working class. After all, socialism has been thoroughly discredited--there are no hardy alternatives to the capitalist free market and its prerequisites--and since the end of World War II, U.S. culture has made great strides in transforming Americans into pure economic agents, the homo economicus that has so worried modern papacies.

In the past, adult citizens of this nation played a variety of social roles--primarily as parents, then as participants in the civic lives of their communities. Many adults of my generation--single or married without children--can only classify themselves as consumers and workers, mere cogs who maintain the capitalist machine at one end and wade through its material accretion at the other.

Meanwhile, deliverance from our economic turmoil remains predicated on a global program of unrelenting economic growth. This addiction to growth as a cure-all for economic and social woes is likely to eventually fail us. Even if it manages to get the American economy through this next looming crisis, it is hardly a sustainable plan for the future. After all, a world full of people consuming at American levels would be a smoggy and difficult place to call home. At some point we are going to have to confront a slow growth, even a no-growth future. What kind of long-term thinking and planning are we putting into that prospect?

Capitalism, in its latest guise of the neoliberal free market, is repeatedly touted as the best chance to liberate the impoverished world from the misery of want, but the church reminds us that it is hardly a program for delivering the overly developed world from the enslavement of "I want."

The West apparently has learned little from the hard lessons of the Great Depression. As we confront what may be the next depression, I hope we have a better plan than deluding people already afflicted with affluenza into new buying binges. What we want are lives that are more full, not lives that are simply full of more stuff.

By KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.