More junk
To the Smithsonian magazine, no less:
However, you do a disservice to your readers when you refer to any part of the mail that Americans send and receive as "junk." It's ironic that on the same page you mark the birth of the potato chip, calling it culinary history and noting its $6 billion industry. One would hope the same level of detachment would be used to describe the mail, which supports an $800 billion mailing industry that employs 9 million people. That's not junk. That's commerce.
Hmmm, I think John Maynard Keynes made a suggestion on another way of using junk to create employment:
If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.
