The latest hook from LinkedIn drew my attention to a recent article by Tyler Cohen, a Bloomberg Opinion writer. Besides finding out that Bloomberg Opinion is a thing, I learned that at least one person is worried because Americans are acquiring less stuff.

Really? Too many wildfires, too few blue whales, white supremacists, no health care, and you are kept awake by a decline in consumerism? I feel like TC must belong to another species.

John Oliver’s show this week put a name to the nasty practice of pretending to be your opposite: Astroturfing. Think of it as artificial grass roots. A corporation spends money creating a fake uprising of people who support what it wants, with a misleading name. A group supporting fracking might be called Consortium for Renewable Energy That Doesn’t Create Earthquakes, for example. If that sounds crazy, check out the real examples in the latest episode of Last Week Tonight.

I hint a whiff of Astroturfing in this Bloomberg piece, because unless this author is the love child of Jack Donaghy and Avery Jessup, he surely can’t really believe what he is saying. The gist is, we don’t own books, we have Kindles. We don’t own CDs, we have Spotify. We don’t own DVDs, we have Netflix. We don’t own cars, we have Uber. We don’t own homes, we rent. This is Bad.

Sounds great to me! Having recently downsized in a big way, I can attest that less stuff to wade through is liberating; our dwelling looks so open and neat, and the remaining items are easy to find. Folks with less stuff can more easily take advantage of an opportunity that requires a move. Or perhaps people are prioritizing experiences–adventure travel, for example–over things, as one commenter opined.

There is no world view in which First World people have too few items, right? Wrong. We now have TC’s world view. Some great quotes, and my response:

• The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. Certainly families who owned  property in the form of slaves created multi-generational wealth.
• [Property ownership] set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of training for future entrepreneurship. Property ownership creates feudal peasants, while entrepreneurship creates jobs long on hours and short on wages and benefits.
• Perhaps we are becoming more communal and caring in positive ways, but it also seems to be more conformist and to generate fewer empire builders and entrepreneurs. I actually prefer communal, caring persons to wannabe emperor-entrepreneurs; those latter are the ones forcing us to conform.

At one point, TC refers to the more commonsensical, broad libertarian intuitions of the American public. I can only hope that Bloomberg Opinion is considered a wild outlier of hate-thy-neighbor and biggering-is-better. Not my values.

Making these faux-factual statements seems like a form of astroturfing, though on second thought, perhaps not, since this is in the opinion section. We’ll find out soon enough if most Americans choose the narcissistic, I mean libertarian, social contract. Register to vote!