Every once in a while someone suggests that one of the pillars of the American hyper consumerism that is laying waste to the earth is morally questionable. The response is usually vitriolic. Here is no exception.

Nevertheless, it is the job of people with sense to say the obvious over and over again: We can't have a world where everyone lives life of riches without restraint. There's not enough stuff in the world to buy and sell to make it happen. Eventually, even Americans, the greediest people on earth, will start to see that, and indeed accept less than multi-million dollar salaries, less than $50,000 cars, etc., etc., and the storm of advertising lies that accosts us every day will begin to abate.

Why do I know this will happen? Because the limits of the productivity of the earth will support, materially, the new ethic that has been growing up here spiritually since the 1970s. It takes a long time for a new ethic to prevail. It tool over 300 years for the status of slaves to go from slave to nominally free to now (in some cases) actually free.

And the world will be a quieter, more humane, and above all more rational place.

PS: What you ad-lovers want to happen to the Internet is what happened to radio between its inception in the early 920s and now. Originally it was wide-ranging in what was broadcast. Then gradually the profit motive and ever-more intrusive and manipulative ads took it over. How many of you intelligent Slate readers can bear to listen to it now?