Every society seeks to establish a set of meanings through which people can relate themselves to the world. — Daniel Bell

No one "voted in" the market economy and the industrial revolution, but today issues of direction of the economy, costs, redress, priorities, and goals all have become matters of conscious and debated social policy.

What makes the spectacle of Western bourgeois society so repulsive is the waste and squander of resources on needless products of status or display (e.g., the large, heavy automobile; the extravagant packaging of consumer items) for the sake of consumption.

No one can buy his share of "clean air" in the market; one has to use communal mechanisms in order to deal with pollution.