Consumerism

I didn't want to let this pass as sensible commentary. It's hard to critique a book review, so my objective is not to lambast any individual. However the following statement needs clarification:

tracing our descent from plain consumers into decadent turbo-consumer society back to the work of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek in the 1930s. Their argument, in an era of Nazism and communism, that social spending as opposed to private consumption was the road to serfdom and tyranny sowed the seeds of the low-tax, small-state, free-market agendas of Reagan and Thatcher.

I don't see what's so objectionable to using the very real examples of Nazism and communism to warn that granting the state unprecendeted power can pose a serious threat to individual liberty. The characterisation of Mises and Hayek as champions of consumerism completely misses the point of where long term growth comes from. Indeed the reviewer goes on to assert that

The system has crashed because global resources are running out, or were never there at all.

In actual fact this is Mises and Hayek's argument - that artificial credit creation induces entrepreneurs to expand without realising that there are insufficient resources to go around. It's the jump in interest rate when they realise that there's a real constraint to investment (i.e. saved resources) that constitutes a credit crunch. It appears that neither the reviewer nor the author have given serious thought to the Austrian school economists, so we could dismiss this as mere slandour. But it's important to counteract faulty reasoning whenever we encounter it.