A more accurate way to put that sentence would be "we have a commercial culture that finds it profitable to convince people to buy cheap, polluting crap that I don't think they need."

This is another one of those screeds where in a following post you are shocked...shocked! that I should interpret your thinking as in any way anti-capitalistic. Frankly, I'm not in the mood for that dance yet again.

Your last paragraph makes little sense. Almost everyone in this country who has done a really good job figuring out how stuff works and making things people need, ends up managing workers and making money. Sometimes a lot of it. This also applies to intangible-seeming services like financial ones.

The statistics for how most of the big money has really been earned in this country are readily available. I've posted them often enough.

Every dime that a government spends has been created by someone who made more money than they really needed to live. In fact most of the money the government spends comes from people who made a hell of a lot more money than they really needed to live. Thank God we live in a place where that's still possible.

So far.