I think I've gone and lost this argument. I'll concede it. I will say a few things though.

As a consequence, you argue that there is no place for durable goods in your life.

No? I would rather have a durable good, but if the durable good is going to be that much more expensive than a consumable then I'm going to go with the cheaper option if its something I feel I need and its all I can afford. I'm not saying that this decision is moral, that its good consumerism, that its the best decision, but its the more practical one with the resources I already have.

If I had the money to choose between a $500 IKEA and a $600 Aeron C chair I would go with the Aeron C because its a much better value for the price.

But if my chair breaks tomorrow and I just need a chair to sit on, then I'm going to buy from IKEA since its $40 versus $80. I won't even attempt to find one at Herman Miller since their prices are well above $100.

What the IKEA chair is is a chair. I can sit in it. It supports my weight when I am at a computer. I do not have to stand. It has arm rests and can turn around. It is not nice or pleasant or fun, but its something that will last at least a few months and performs all of the functions that I require out of it.

You have fabricated a justification out of thin air that something that costs less must be a better value because you want to believe it to be true.

Let's compare the values here then, because I still believe I have a point here. I'll illustrate it with a recent purchase.

I just bought a headset, because I realized I actually don't have a microphone of any kind for my PC, and that's not very useful. I looked around Amazon for some deals and settled on a Turtle Beach Z11. It is a headset that is not trash. The microphone works, the padding is fine, and I'm not forced to constantly eat the microphone.

I checked the price of another headset, this one from Astro. $100. Are my Turtle Beaches worse? Of course they are. But are the Astros two and a half times better? No, of course not. They're headsets with better features and better production, but not by that much.

That's more of what I'm getting at, and its why a tax on imports would negate the reason I have for buying cheaper goods. If my Turtle Beaches were $60, I would have bought the Astros, because at that point I'd rather just have a better headset. But for $40? I'll take the cheaper model; I can put that money away. In the meantime, I have a product I can use.

However, it's unusual that you get an argument that it's somehow the virtuous choice because poverty.

Its really not, and I apologize if somehow I communicated any sort of virtue or morality here. Its not about which is the better for my soul, its about what's a more practical decision.

Durable goods like a really nice mouse or chair are great, but they are usually not something practical when you just need a product to perform a function. Most of the time that's all I want. I would like a pen to write with. I would like a chair to sit on. I would like some clothes to wear - though oddly enough the cheapest clothes down at good will are the most durable and at this point he most fashionable so fuck all if I know what's going on there - and so I don't really feel the desire to make a big purchase because I don't expect the product to last forever. I expect it to last long enough to be useful.

I once spent $30 on an MP3 player from China. The touch screen was awful, there was no brand of any kind, and you could feel how cheap it was. You could barely operate it, and it came with a document called "HUMOR.TXT" that was nothing but poorly translated jokes. It had neither wireless nor anything else.

I bought it because I was about to go work for Wal-Mart as an overnight shift and wanted to have something to listen to. The thing lasted 3 months; by the end of the 3 months I had saved enough money to buy a smart phone and just put my music on that. It works much better - though apparently Motorola is about as durable as a chinese MP3 player - but that $30 spent on the player was preferable to the $70 I would have had to spend on an iPod.

This is just an errant thought here, but maybe that's one of the bigger appeals to consumer products. They're not good, but because they're cheap its less of a risk. You get a shitty one and you've spent $10. All you've lost is $10. If you buy something expensive, something that might appear nice, and it turns out you got something defective, you could have blown quite a bit more than that. Its why I didn't risk it with the iPod. Sure it was better, but I'm glad I didn't get it, because in 3 months I ended up replacing it with something better anyway.

I still lost, because you are right that a higher quality product is ultimately better. It'll last longer because its made better.

But seriously if my chair breaks tomorrow I'm just going to buy that shitty IKEA one because the only thing I'll pop $600 on this point is a new laptop, which I will be needing soon as both of its speakers are fried and the hardware is out of date.

Last little addition, speaking of my computer. I will never understand why people my age insist on buying Intel processors for gaming. Yes, the processor will last longer. By the time you start to notice that, the processor is already three years out of date, and you're either looking at a new computer or have already swapped it out for something better.

This is also the most I've argued about buying stuff in my life.