The Inutility Police

In his TechCentralStation article, "The Happiness Police," about the growing empirical evidence that we can't always anticipate which material acquisitions will make us happy, how much and for how long, Arnold Kling asks,

Suppose that you could choose to live either in our society with its current choice of lifestyles or in a society where "happiness police" tell you how many hours you can work, what kind of job you can have, and what kinds of goods and services you can buy. Which society would make you happier?

Uh, we have both kinds of situations in our own society now. Financially independent people live in the choice-of-lifestyles enclave (though with some significant limitations, which I'll outline in a following post), while the wage slaves live in a world where authority figures usually called "employers" tell them about their hours, kinds of jobs and what they are able to buy -- though without regard for our happiness, only theirs.

This last constraint comes in two forms, by the way. Employers not only control what we can buy through the quanities of wages they pay us, but also through their decisions about what they offer us on the market, whether we want it or not -- think of all the abysmally stupid nonsense you see on television and in movie theaters these days, for example, along with all the commercial harassment ("advertising") that tries to get us to pay attention to it.