Your civic duty to return your fruitcake
economic rant
The Christmas season has the unfortunate effect of getting lots of people lots of stuff that they don't want. Let's use the term "fruitcake" for the category of all useless gifts. The responsible citizen returns these gifts and exchanges them for useful things, an especially important responsibility now while the economy is down and resources are tight.
The invisible hand of the free market determines how much of which thing the factories make and the shippers import. The hand is nothing more than the cumulative effect of our individual choices. Usually the factories create things we can use and stores stock them. But Christmas throws all this into question because millions of people are buying millions of presents for millions of other people. The free market winds up creating more fruitcake than we need. Returning the fruitcake provide valuable feedback to the system, reorienting it away from fruitcake and toward utility.
For your own personal wealth (having more of what you can use and less needless junk), and to recalibrate the economy toward useful things, exchange your fruitcake for something useful.
See also Spend Smart.
The Christmas season has the unfortunate effect of getting lots of people lots of stuff that they don't want. Let's use the term "fruitcake" for the category of all useless gifts. The responsible citizen returns these gifts and exchanges them for useful things, an especially important responsibility now while the economy is down and resources are tight.
The invisible hand of the free market determines how much of which thing the factories make and the shippers import. The hand is nothing more than the cumulative effect of our individual choices. Usually the factories create things we can use and stores stock them. But Christmas throws all this into question because millions of people are buying millions of presents for millions of other people. The free market winds up creating more fruitcake than we need. Returning the fruitcake provide valuable feedback to the system, reorienting it away from fruitcake and toward utility.
For your own personal wealth (having more of what you can use and less needless junk), and to recalibrate the economy toward useful things, exchange your fruitcake for something useful.
See also Spend Smart.