ABSTRACT
“What are we to do?” This is, of course, the quintessential question. It assumes there is a problem that must be addressed, and it assumes that we can do something about that problem. In this final chapter, I focus on “do” and all that the verb entails. In Chapter 7, I argued that, while choice in the market has the appearance of “doing,” such activity involves, for the most part, the individual ratification of decisions already made through institutionalized politics and/or the selection among functionally similar if not visually identical products on the ballot or supermarket shelf. The range of choices offered through the market is vast, but those choices are all of a specific character: they are found in an expanding universe of real and fictitious commodities. Not only are alternatives frequently not on offer in the typical marketplace, but the possibility of other forms of social life and political action involving more than choices about what to consume is almost unthinkable. It was no accident when Milton Friedman (1962:15) wrote that “Each man can vote, as it were, for the color of tie he wants and get it….” 1 A simple politics for the simple life.
