The Lo Down on Land

New economic and land policy column at the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation

The billboards littering the highway might not be as random as you think.

The choice to drive isn’t so much a choice, but a task you’re forced to engage in order to pay rent. Corporations pay EXTRA money to advertise where people are stuck in traffic. When you are stuck in traffic looking at a sign to buy a Big Mac, that’s not accidental. Corporate America paid for you to sit there.

“According to Mikolajczak-Degrauwe & Brengman in the Journal of Behavior Addictions, billboard and Internet ads appear to encourage compulsive buying more so than other types of advertising.”

They employ behaviorism to ruin your life. We think being in our cars and living in single-family home “castles” in isolation is freedom. It is not. It is not freedom when selfish people motivated by profit manipulate you and then steals your other choices.