Below shows the results if you search Amazon for “Top 2025 Christmas gifts.” I will bet over 95 percent of them will be in landfills, bottoms of drawers never to be used again, or some equivalent by the end of January.

I’m pretty live-and-let-live about what makes people happy (though not when it hurts someone else without consent), but I couldn’t find one item there whose existence made the world better compared to replacing the gift in the image with a non-material friendly thoughtful gift.

Economists talk about economic growth making people’s lives better. Two considerations:

First, addiction fueled by Amazon’s armies of people trained to control your rewards system more effectively than you can undermines the premise that free markets based on voluntary trade improves people’s lives. It would be obvious if they were selling fentanyl that most buyers weren’t voluntarily buying. I know there are differences here, but how significant are those differences?

Second, if the government doesn’t enforce the Bill of Rights, in particular that people shall not be deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of law and the manufacture and delivery of these products violates that amendment through polluting and depleting, I don’t see how you can call it a free market.

You know what I’d love for gifts? I’d love a note offering me as a gift:

• To make me dinner sometime
• To give me a shoulder rub
• To listen to me so I feel heard
• To make me feel understood about things I feel vulnerable about.

I get these things from friends, but I’d prefer them more than anything in the image below.

[EDIT: When I expand the image, my blog software seems to lower the resolution. I think it’s a bug or setting I don’t know how to chance. Sorry if you can’t make out the words, but you can probably tell most of the items from the images. You can search Amazon yourself, but I recommend not.]

Retry later

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