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At the end of every year, as we make our way through the holidays, you’ll hear no shortage of complaints about the rampant hyper-consumerism at the heart of modern American society. And these complaints aren’t without merit. Flip on the TV or walk through any city’s commercial district before Christmas, and it’s easy to get the impression that the entire American concept of familial love rests on how much stuff we buy for each other.

Beyond Christmas, there’s no question that purchasing and acquiring stuff is a central part of American life. Many consider their social status to be reflected by how much they can and do spend on luxurious goods and experiences. And, each year, billions of dollars of marketing goes into convincing us that we are one purchase away from permanent bliss.

There’s no question that modern America is a very “consumerist” society. But before condemning that as a “moral failure” of the American people, it’s important to understand that this is the sought-after result of our government’s policies.

Consumption is an essential part of life. We obviously need food, water, clothing, and shelter to survive. And, as human civilization has grown beyond Malthusian hunter-gatherer conditions, the goods and services available to consume have made life safer, more comfortable, and more fulfilling than our early ancestors could have dreamed of.

But all that progress rests on one thing above all: our ancestor’s willingness to forgo consumption, save the fruits of their labor, and invest it in the production of more valued goods and services.

Forgoing consumption is not easy, but it is incredibly important. Because saving in order to invest is quite literally the engine of civilization.

But saving itself is also an important aspect of a healthy society. Our world is unstable and uncertain. Saving money protects us from future difficulties we cannot foresee. And further, it allows us to pass on wealth to our descendants—improving the starting point and overall well-being of future generations.

So, if the well-being of all of our society requires we invest in more valued lines of production, our personal well-being requires we consume, and the well-being of our future selves and descendants requires we save, what determines which action we choose? We can’t do all three at the same time, after all.

Like anything, it comes down to our preferences. More specifically, in this case, because we’re comparing the satisfaction of our wants in different time periods, it comes down to what economists call time preference—the extent to which we value present satisfaction over that exact same satisfaction in the future.

For some—mainly children—immediate gratification is highly preferred to delayed gratification, even when that delayed gratification is much larger. These people are said to have a high time preference.

Typically, as we become adults, we come to recognize the benefits of withholding some of our consumption in order to save and/or invest in productive pursuits. Although it is by no means easy, we start to improve our lives dramatically if we can find the discipline to act in the interest of our future selves. Those who forgo a lot of instant gratification through consumption to pursue the delayed—but often greater—gratification that comes from being frugal or productive are said to have a low time preference.

Essentially, all of human history is one long story of societies successfully working to lower their time preference, investing in the well-being of future generations, and leaving the world better off than it had been before. While it is always more comfortable in the moment to satisfy our immediate wants, the consistency of falling time preferences across most of the globe suggests that humans naturally gravitate toward sacrificing their own material comforts to bring about a better future for themselves and their children. That is a beautiful thing, and it’s the reason our species has achieved so much. But over the last century or so, this glorious, multi-thousand-year trend has come under attack.

In the past, some economists mistakenly came to view savings as economic waste. Money saved, they thought, was money “leaking” out of the economy. This idea, which came to be known as “the paradox of thrift,” was then used by political officials to help justify the government’s takeover of the monetary system.

Today, with full control over the supply and value of money, the United States government has settled on a policy that aims to bring about permanent price inflation. They do this by printing money and injecting it into the economy through the credit markets. Doing so transfers a lot of wealth to the political class and creates the recurring nightmarish cycle of economic booms and recessions. But it also has profound effects on the public’s behavior.

Because permanent price inflation punishes people for saving. Money loses its value over time, meaning—in a reversal of how it’s worked for almost all of human history—money saved today will not be able to purchase as much in the future.

With what is, in effect, a tax on savings, the government encourages people to adopt more child-like, high time preference behaviors by saving less and consuming more. Living paycheck-to-paycheck to fund more GDP-bloating consumption is a good thing, in this backward economic view, as is going into debt to fund even more consumption.

This government-induced rise in time preference also has incredibly damaging impacts on our culture as the consumption of stuff takes priority over the production of resources and the cultivation of community. And the prioritization of immediate gratification spreads beyond economic decisions to encompass all aspects of life.

The American political class may really believe that savings are economically damaging and that they should be discouraged. Or they may just see that argument as another useful justification for a monetary system that is making them very rich. But regardless, the kind of hyper-consumerist, living paycheck-to-paycheck, buried-in-debt lifestyle that is used to chastise Americans—especially around Christmas—is precisely what the American monetary system is built to encourage.

Finding the hyper-fixation on buying stuff around the holidays off-putting is appropriate. But make sure you place the blame on the right people.

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