Galbraith brought to the anti-conformity chorus a special verve in depicting Americans as pathetic, passive lumps, as manipulable as clay. Americans were what modern liberalism relishes -- victims , to be treated as wards of a government run by liberals. It never seemed to occur to Galbraith and like-minded liberals that ordinary Americans might resent that depiction and might express their resentment with their votes.
Advertising, Galbraith argued, was a leading cause of America's "private affluence and public squalor." By that he meant Americans' consumerism, which produced their deplorable reluctance to surrender more of their income to taxation, trusting government to spend it wisely.
If advertising were as potent as Galbraith thought, the advent of television -- a large dose of advertising, delivered to every living room -- should have caused a sharp increase in consumption relative to savings. No such increase coincided with the arrival of television, but Galbraith, reluctant to allow empiricism to slow the flow of theory, was never a martyr to Moynihan's axiom that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.
A better strategy would be to just quote Galbraith and let the reader come to their own conclusion that those ideas are bankrupt, as Robert Samuelson did today.
"Automobiles have an importance greater than the roads on which they are driven," he wrote scornfully. "Alcohol, comic books and mouthwash all bask under the superior reputation of the [private] market. Schools, judges and municipal swimming pools lie under the evil reputation of bad kings [government]." The book argued for more government spending and less private spending.
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