What Suits Teach Us About Markets

Written by John Horvat

In the book, Return to Order, there is a chapter on standardization and how it favors the advance of frenetic intemperance in economy. Standardized goods, we claim, lead to the standardized masses. It destroys the human element that gives warmth, life and meaning to economy.

In theory, such affirmations are detached and abstract. The best way to understand standardization is with real life examples.

An article on custom-made suits in the September 4, 2012 issue of The New York Times Magazine is a perfect example of the point we make.

Author Adam Davidson comments on how the art of making a tailored suit is fast disappearing. Those who still wear suits today simply do not realize what was once involved. We are so used to picking something off the rack that it hardly occurs to us that buying a suit was something special.

And yet it used to be a personal experience. The made-to-measure or the more labor intensive “bespoke” suit used to be the standard, not the exception. The tailor was an artisan not a manufacturer. Davidson describes how the bespoke suit called on the tailor to create a unique pattern, cut a chosen fabric and construct a suit that fit perfectly the client and his preferences. Every aspect of the suit’s design was customized from the width of the lapel to the size and number of pockets. No two suits were the same. Davidson asked a custom tailor what makes a bespoke suit so unique. He replied: “It’s the result of skills that only a trained hand can perform. Modern technology cannot create anything comparable.”

While the bespoke suit may be a work of art, the nature of the business does not allow for huge profit margins. There is no economy of scale, since the costs of producing each suit is just about the same whether it be one or fifty. Because of the small volume, marketing is usually limited to reputation and customer loyalty. A person can make a good living at the trade but he cannot strike it rich and still maintain quality. “The only way to make money in the perfectionist craftsperson industry,” Davidson concludes, “it seems, is to stop being a perfectionist craftsperson.”

Only a few decades ago, there were thousands of traditional tailors plying their trade. There were also thousands of clothing factories that produced made-to-measure suits using quality-tailoring skills. The result was a comfortable, durable and attractive suit at affordable prices. Now, Davidson states, there are only a few dozen such tailors left in the United States catering to the high-end market. Likewise, there are only a handful of quality clothing factories left standing. In their place are cheap mass-produced suits, often made by the millions in China, which have flooded our markets.

What is really lamentable is the loss of tailoring skills more than the actual suit itself. We cannot expect everyone to be able to buy expensive bespoke suits that can now cost as much as $4,000. We would rather see a return to the same skills, artisan spirit and quality work that once governed the whole price range of suits, from inexpensive to very expensive.

There is no doubt that standardized suits may be cheaper, but our point is that something very important has been lost in the process. Lost is that taste for quality that enriches and spreads throughout the culture. Gone is that personal interaction with the customer that helped determine fashion and established clothier traditions. Now it is the international fashion houses that dictate what will be in fashion for the whole world. We are left with cold impersonal clothing markets dominated by mass-marketing techniques and mass-produced items with a general decline in quality, especially as one descends down the product line.

Some might object that the demise of the tailored suit is merely the result of the inevitable march of market forces. Nostalgic consumers should stop living in the past and accept the tailored suit’s standardization as part of this “progress.”

We would reply that these trends are not the result of orderly markets but of a disorder we call frenetic intemperance. Those infected with this disorder seek to free themselves of all market restraints and engage in any and all risky practices in a frenetic rush for ever greater volume and profits. This often ends in failure since not all have the resources to compete in such aggressive environments.

Much more than market forces, frenetic intemperance has changed and undermined the tailoring landscape. For those who stay in the tailoring trade, for example, there is the constant temptation to sacrifice quality and reputation and expand production to make more and easier money.

Davidson notes how modern clothiers often begin small and established a strong brand reputation based on a tailoring tradition, and then roll out on all sorts of cheaper mass-produced branded products like fragrances to become billion dollar businesses. There are also those willing to adulterate their own strong reputation by branding their names and selling them out to bigger concerns. Others are encouraged to abandon their tailoring skills and outsource, mechanize and cheapen their production by moving overseas. Everything is geared to disregard quality tailoring and engage in a frenetic search for expansion.

Ultimately, what we see in the case of the tailor is a clash of cultures. In the culture of frenetic intemperance, there is the rush for increasing standardization and centralization of production. By its massive scale, such production leads to a diminishing of quality and embellishment. It also leads to the standardized consumption and the glut of markets. Sometimes, as in the case of some “designer” goods, these products are even more expensive that tailor-made goods. We feel such production impoverishes a culture and, by its intemperance, carries within it seeds of self-destruction.

Return to Order discusses a second culture that is not ruled by frenetic intemperance. It represents a market that is naturally tempered by human values and institutions. Our proposal does not concretely suggest that all should go around in custom-made suits. All we are saying is that the tailor represents something of these values that are missing from our culture. When someone buys the tailor’s suit, he also buys reputation, tradition, quality, durability and value. When an economy is imbued with these values at all price levels, it enriches a culture and serves as the basis of a stable and thriving social order. These values that temper an economy are those which we want to return.

This clash of cultures is what Return to Order is all about.

Photos from Marvelous TFP Christmas Open House

Here are some photos of yesterday’s marvelous Christmas Open House at TFP-America Needs Fatima.  Every year, more and more people attend.  See the beautiful atmosphere:

Saint Nicholas was a great hit.

A Christmas theater skit by the boys from Saint Louis de Montfort Academy.

The place was lit up and merry.

The band played live Christmas music.

The nativity scene was very colorful.

Home made goodies were in the dining hall.

One of the participants wrote this about his expectation to attend the TFP Open House:
“If I can go into a marvelous ambiance, be among well-dressed people with good manners, have intelligent conversation, listen to live (non-synthesized) music, eat some smoked salmon, etc., I will be a happy man.

“Even if it happens only once or twice a year, the potency of the conviviality, good cheer, and Faith enriches my life for the year. It funds, sustains, and empowers me.

“You can have rock stars, actors, celebrities, talk show hosts, gurus, and the rest of the pop culture. I highly recommend this. This is not snobbery. (That is what happens with pseudo-elites like the present administration, its minions, celebrity-supporters, and media attain power.)

“As the fencing instructor here, I can tell you that this is a microcosmic, organic society and hierarchy that works, and to be part of it is to feel fulfilled. Downton Abbey hints at it.  But this is real.  This works.  It is marvelous.”

The Great Benefits of Suffering

Written by Saint Claude de La Colombiere

When I see a Christian grief-stricken at the trials God sends him I say to myself, “Here is a man who is grieved at his own happiness. He is asking God to be delivered from something he ought to be thanking Him for.”

I am quite sure that nothing more advantageous could happen to him than what causes him so much grief. I have a hundred unanswerable reasons for saying so. But if I could read into the future and see the happy outcome of his present misfortune, how greatly strengthened I would be in my judgment! If we could discover the designs of Providence it is certain we would ardently long for the “evils” we are now so unwilling to suffer. We would rush forward to accept them with the utmost gratitude if we had a little faith and realized how much God loves us and has our interests at heart.

What profit can come to me from this illness that ties me down and obliges me to give up all the good I was doing, you may ask. What advantage can I expect from this ruin of my life that leaves me desperate and hopeless? It is true that sudden great misfortune may appear to overwhelm you and not allow you the opportunity of profiting by it. But wait a while and you will see that by it God is preparing you to receive the greatest marks of His favor. But for this accident you would not have perhaps become any less good than you are, but you would not have become holy.

Isn’t it true that, since you have been trying to lead a good Christian life, there has been something you have been unwilling to surrender to God? Some worldly ambition, some pride in your attainments, some indulgence of the body, some blameworthy habit, some company that is the occasion of sin for you? It was only this final step that prevented you from attaining the perfect freedom of the love of God. It wasn’t really very much, but you could not bring yourself to make this last sacrifice. It wasn’t very much, but there is nothing harder for a Christian than to break the last tie that binds him to the world or to his own self. He knows he ought to do it, and until he does it there is something wrong with his life. But the very thought of the remedy terrifies him, for the malady has taken such a hold on him that it cannot be cured without the help of a serious and painful operation. So it was necessary to take you unawares, to cut deep into the flesh with a skillful hand when you were least expecting it and remove the ulcer concealed within, or otherwise you would never be well.

The misfortune that has befallen you will soon do what all your exercises of piety would never have been able to do.


Adapted from The Secret of Peace and Happiness by Saint Claude de La Colombiere and Jean Baptiste de Saint Jure, (Staten Island, N.Y., St. Paul Publications, 1961), p. 111.
 

French Govt Threatens to Disband Catholic Pro-family Activists for Violating 'Secularism' | LifeSiteNews.com

by Matthew Cullinan Hoffman

PARIS, December 14, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) - The French government will use a new proposed “Observatory of Secularism” to monitor and perhaps “dissolve” organizations such as Institut Civitas, a Catholic activist group opposing the government’s proposed homosexual “marriage” law, according to Reuters.

Reuters’ Religion Editor Tom Heneghan reports that France’s Interior Minister Manuel Valls announced the policy at a Meeting on Secularism organized by socialist members of France’s National Assembly, the country’s lower legislative house, on Tuesday. 
Reuters is the only news agency known to LifeSiteNews.com to have reported on the statements, which were left unmentioned in the French press.

For more, see below:

French govt threatens to disband Catholic pro-family activists for violating 'secularism' | LifeSiteNews.com

NEETs, A Youth Without Futures

Written by Gary J. Isbell

NEET is a term coined by the United Kingdom government that describes youth between the ages 16 through 24 who are “Not in Education, Employment, or Training.” It refers to 19 million young people throughout the seventeen-country Eurozone. This sad statistic is only a segment of the total unemployed. Failing economies and entitlement mentalities fostered by Euro-Socialism, are now bearing the undesirable fruits of NEETs.

According to Massimiliano Mascherini from the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, “The figures on increasing youth unemployment are shocking. But in the calculations, we generally only count the young people who are ready to work and who want to work. There is also an enormous group which is so demotivated that they are turning away from the labor market.”^[1] He goes on the say that this group has little faith in their fellow man and social institutions. They are politically and socially isolated and consequently, prone to end up in crime.

This generation has no hope in the future and no motivation to change their state in life or the current moral crisis. They see no solutions offered by politicians or have no hope in the present financial climate. One must ask what produced this degree of apathy and cynicism in such a large portion of today’s youth? The answer is simpler than one might think: the loss of integral morality coupled with a life imbued with erroneous socialistic ideas. Why make any effort if the government is willing to provide subsidies? This produces an entitlement generation that is fast becoming the new barbarians.

Europe has been playing a fiscal shell game by implementing socialist “reforms” that incur deficit spending obliging those who will work to subsidize those who will not, while passing on the prodigious debt to future generations. Currently the U.S. is suffering an unacceptable 16.8 percent youth unemployment that pales in comparison to the European Union’s average of 22.7 percent, with Italy at 34.5, Spain at 53 and Greece at a staggering 55 percent. Any child can understand the perils of deficit spending. The problem with the socialists is that sooner or later they run out of other people’s money.

So, what will the NEETs of today leave as a legacy for future generations?

The riots in the UK in August of 2011 are a prime example of the worst element in the NEETs. They do nothing, own nothing, have nothing to lose and are open to participate in violent and chaotic behavior stimulated by agents of agitation.

Many of the UK rioters attempted to give a moral explanation for what they saw as justifiable looting. “I only looted shops that I knew were like major consumer brands, stuff that was like industries, businesses, like big businesses, like international businesses that are just raping the world anyway,” said a Battersea resident who looted in Clapham.^[2] A 19-year-old who stole from a JD Sports shop argued: “JD is also selling Nike stuff. Nike blatantly commits world crimes against people in factories, sweatshops, so they’re getting their comeuppance now. It’s karma so I just hit those shops, I didn’t hit any small town businesses that affect our local economy.”^[3] Since when do international businesses have no effect on a local economy? NEET logic 101.

Justify as they might, the root of the problem is much deeper. Europe is now realizing the sordid effects of their departure from the origins of the very blessings that brought about the civilization that is being destroyed. Europe has been pursuing the false utopia promised by the liberal proponents of socialism and has one of two choices. Either plummet headlong into the abyss of anarchy, chaos and despair as a result of failed socialistic promises, or return to the framework of order that created Christian civilization when the four Gospels were applied to social life.