"Until now, arguments for limiting consumption have tended to come from the left rather than the right."

"They date back at least to the economist Thorstein Veblen, who, at the start of the twentieth century, wrote acidly about the 'conspicuous consumption' engaged in by grandees of the Gilded Age. More recently, a 'degrowth' movement has emerged, which aims to decrease consumption and to de-prioritize G.D.P. growth on the grounds that they are harmful to the environment and that, in any case, accumulating more 'stuff' doesn’t really increase the well-being of people.This argument depends on two concepts familiar to economists: the diminishing marginal utility of consumption, which is, roughly speaking, the notion that if you already own nineteen dolls, buying a twentieth won’t give you much pleasure, and competitive consumption, or the idea that many people are trapped in an endless cycle of trying to outshine their friends and neighbors with their purchases.... 'Trump, degrowther,' the leftist journalist Doug Henwood commented online last week.... 'What he is doing is fairly unprecedented: explicitly saying that he is willing to pay an economic price in terms of growth in order to protect something else that he thinks is valuable and important,' Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King’s College London who is the author of the 2024 book 'Growth: A History and a Reckoning' told me...."

Writes John Cassidy, in "Donald Trump Versus Barbie/Can the Administration retain public support for a trade policy that could force Americans to buy less stuff?" (The New Yorker).

Why don't the anti-consumption lefties embrace Trump? 

My first reaction to Trump's "Maybe the children will have 2 dolls instead of 30" was: "This reminds me of what those on the left used to say to us around the theme of global warming: We have too much stuff already. We should think small. Less plastic. Consume less. Lighten your carbon footprint."

And to go back to April 9, before the "doll" remark, I said: "Why aren't progressives on Trump's side here? The issues of consumerism, labor conditions, slavery, and environmentalism are all on Trump's side...."

I know there are a lot of women — young and old — who collect dolls and prioritize quantity, and it's not always the case that less is more, and you don't want someone else telling you to find more value in less. There is minimalism and there is maximalism. Your style is yours and mine is mine. Greed/frugality — these are orientations. And yet, there are some eternal values here to contemplate. And I just want to end this post by talking about the eternal value that is the child's love for a doll. The core value is family love. A little girl (or boy) imagines caring for a real baby. You don't line real babies up on shelves or toss them en masse into a large bin. What is so important about a doll is at its height when the little girl has one doll — specifically one. I remember my cousin Elsa's doll, Sugar. When I was approximately 2, I believed Sugar was quite famous, known to all and dearly loved.