The luxury of choice

In a comment to my post on Payday Loans, CET eloquently argues that "it is more expensive to be poor". This got me to thinking, because one of the premises of Voluntary Simplicity is that it is LESS expensive to live simply.

The difference between Voluntary Simplicity and Involuntary Simplicity (otherwise known as poverty) is that the Voluntary Simpleton can make choices. He can make choices because he has accumulated capital. He can buy a six-month supply of spaghetti sauce when it is on sale, because he has the money to take advantage of the sale. Not only does he have the capital, he has the values that led him to accumulate the capital.

Voluntary Simplicity, while rejecting consumerism, is still very much a middle-class, Protestant-ethic way of looking at things. Sometimes this is very explicit, as when the authors of Your Money or Your Life urge their readers to save money, buy Treasury bonds and live off the interest. In other cases it is implicit, as when Thoreau, a Harvard graduate whose family owned a pencil factory, decided to camp out on land owned by his friend Emerson.

As I have argued elsewhere, the essence of Voluntary Simplicity is not simplicity, but deliberateness, and deliberateness is the antithesis of the consumerist, immediate-gratification mindset that puts people into situations where a payday loan is even a plausible solution. In a Voluntarily Simple world, the payday loan shops would all go out of business.