When planning for a party, many people spend an awful lot of money on party decorations without thinking about how much decorating they can do without buying anything. All the decorations for a party can quickly add up to a considerable sum of money, but most people would actually prefer fewer decorations made by the people they care about than a house full of decorations bought at a party store.

This is emblematic of how a consumer society can undermine the quality of life of its members. The things we buy have only a passing meaning, whereas the things we make always mean something, however flawed they are.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with commerce. It is a form of glue that binds societies together, and commerce has done far more than any political or religious movement to promoting peace and harmony across barriers of language, culture, and nationality. The globalization of commerce over the last sixty years has dramatically altered the world that we live in.

For most part, that change has been positive. Opponents of globalization point to the inequity of international business relationships as being emblematic of how economic ties fail to produce equality. But those inequities only catalyze the beginning of international commerce. In time, global commerce will create much greater equality.

In fact, most of the good that is done by commerce is on the producing side. Consumption creates demand, which requires production, which creates jobs, which provides income to families. Throughout the world, wealth eventually flows to where production is taking place.

But, inevitably, money also flows away from where consumption is taking place. Now, the people in the world’s most developed and supposedly richest countries carry by far the greatest personal debt. The reason for this is simple: when a society consumes more than it produces, it ends up having to borrow money to pay for its consumption. In the United States, record levels of personal debt are among the factors that are slowing the economic recovery.

But the subtle erosion of individual self-reliance is certainly more fundamental and is perhaps more damaging to the society as a whole than the debt burden or the stature of consuming nations in the international community. Goods that we purchase are different than goods that we produce. The act of buying something is different from the process of creating something. In the United States today, hardly anybody grows their own food, builds their own house, or even changes the oil in their own car. If something breaks, we don’t fix it; we throw it away and get a new one.

Whenever we deviate from that behavior, our experience changes suddenly and dramatically. For example, if you go out and buy party decorations and someone compliments you on them, the compliment belongs more to some nameless designer than to you. If you make the decorations yourself, on the other hand, then the compliment has meaning because it is given for something that you produced with your own creativity and effort.