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“Who pays the cost of the convenience we demand?” 

I thought of this quote from Sara Thomsen’s powerful song “Is it for Freedom” while reading Harry Drabik’s recent, superb article on how technology clutters up our lives with unnecessary but costly stuff (“It was easier being stupid,” Reader, June 26, 2025). 

Harry says, “The technology is there so we use it...” He asks, “How smart are we being required to pay for little-used and  essentially worthless benefits...?”

Sara Thomsen’s song is about the costs people in foreign countries pay for our wars to protect “freedom” and “profit for big business.” But I think her excellent message can be applied to our excessively consumptive American lifestyles. We pay a huge cost for all the “convenience” we not only demand but think we can’t live without. 

Many years ago Pete Seeger performed a song called “Garbage.” The message was we are filling up our lives, the air, the oceans, the landfills and our minds with garbage. Too much of what our economy produces is unneeded plastic crap destined for the landfill. The only purpose is to generate consumer spending and corporate profits.

While we are busy buying stuff we don’t need and that adds little to our quality of life, many of us live  “lives of quiet desperation.” These words of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) resonate today as half our population is in poverty or working poor. Many people struggle to pay the rent, or mortgage and deal with the other high costs of living.

Wisconsin Watch recently reported that homelessness for Wisconsin K-12 students increased 9%  in 2024, setting a record high. 

A Wisconsin Policy Forum report found 20,000 Wisconsin students were homeless during the 2023-24 school year. 

Doesn’t this make you proud to be an American?

I think we can agree that raising children is the most important activity of any society. We claim our children are the future, but in America we do very little to ensure all children have what they need to grow into healthy, happy, well adjusted and productive adults.

Too many children do not have  the food, shelter, medical care and education they need. 

Raising healthy children requires much more than basic needs. Child rearing requires good parents.

Parents need to have the skill, knowledge, time and desire to be good parents. Many occupations require training, education or licensing. But anyone can become a parent with no training. 

Some schools provide some parenting education. One source says 26 states include this in curriculum standards. But this doesn’t mean kids learn much. How much do you remember for your high school classes?

According to the Centers for Disease Control, 45% of pregnancies are unplanned. Are all these children unwanted? Are they born to parents who are not ready or able to care for them adequately? 

One wonders if there is a connection between this statistic and the 50% of people who are struggling economically. Does poverty play a role in reproductive choices? The cost of birth control can be anywhere from zero with good insurance to $2,400 a year without coverage.

But our current political leadership, and their “Christian” supporters, are attacking education, sex education, birth control, requirements that insurance cover reproductive health care and even the idea of universal access for heath care. 

What is good for people and the whole society is sacrificed for political expediency and fanatical religiosity. 

Many of our social and political problems are the result of people being uninformed and misinformed. Ignorance is bliss. 

Hobbes, the stuffed tiger in the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, says, “Why waste time on learning when ignorance is instantaneous.” This seems to be a widespread practice in America.

I often think about our national obsession with the automobile. Big metropolitan areas have become awful places to live. The congestion, traffic, lengthy commute times, noise and pollution is astonishing. All caused by too many cars and trucks. Even smaller cities are becoming unpleasant.  

Given the crazy way many people drive, it is a wonder only 40,000 people are killed in traffic every year. A bigger tragedy is the more than 4 million people injured in auto accidents. Many of these people will suffer long-term physical and financial problems. 

Like with many other aspects of American life, we know what needs to be done. We know that mass transit is an essential feature of any modern city. We know it works and is popular where it has been built. We know it is cheaper, more efficient and better for the environment than automobile-based transportation systems. 

In 2024 the average car owner paid $12,297 to operate their vehicle (up $115 from 2023). Many people would be much better off financially buying a transit pass and renting a car when needed. 

Why do people put up with this? Having a car is more convenient. It is a part of the American dream and “freedom.” But is it really freedom to be financially enslaved to the auto, oil, auto loan and insurance industries? Certainly this freedom comes with a high financial cost.

Instead of addressing our real needs, Congress is busy giving billionaires another tax cut and slashing all other government services except the Pentagon and immigration enforcement. 

America leads the world with 735 billionaires and 24.5 million millionaires (2022 figures). 
In 2023 the median household income was $80,610. Did those millionaires work 12.5 times harder? Did they produce 1,200% more? 

Why do the rest of us put up with this absurd level of inequality? 

Our current capitalist economic system is not immutable. It is not based on some kind of “natural law.” There are other options for organizing a society that produce lower inequality, provide better quality of life and result in more individual happiness.

Too many of us have been indoctrinated to believe alternative ways of organizing society and the economy are socialism and un-American. We have been told social democracies, like the Scandinavian countries, pay high taxes and have oppressive bureaucracies that kill initiative, free enterprise and personal freedom. This is not true. Again, most Americans are not well informed.

I recommend reading The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life by Anu Partanen (or read my article “Old-Fashioned America and The ‘Well Being’ State,” Reader, Jan. 12, 2017). Ms. Partanen shows how Nordic  citizens, because of cheaper, more efficient public services, enjoy more individual freedom than Americans.

Perhaps we need to rethink the conveniences we demand.