Want and wants.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew

"Hey, Matt, Wendell Berry's on line one," a staff member told me. I love hearing from Wendell Berry, the environmentalist, communitarian, farmer, novelist, poet, and outraged American, so I leapt to the phone.

There was his rich, deep voice with its distinctive Kentucky accent, conveying his greetings and then commiserating about the war and the sundry sins of the Bush Administration.

After these pleasantries and unpleasantries, Berry said he wanted to talk to me about the Comment I wrote last month entitled "Our Sinful Economy." In it, I blueprinted a floor of decency for every American--a guaranteed minimum annual income of around $20,000 to $25,000.

"You've got to go further," he said.

At first, I thought he meant that the amount I specified was too low.

Not at all.

"To have a valid economic criticism, you're going to have to propose a kind of community life that would keep the economic value where it is, in the community," he said. "If you simply put more money in the hands of the poor and the middle class, it will bypass the community and go to Wal-Mart and the other big companies. Those bastards will be just sucking it up."

As a result, people will be going ever deeper into debt, spending their allowance on "four-wheel drives they don't need, and jet skis, and all that," he said.

"We're a nation that's spoiled and trained to be suckers," he said. "We've democratized a kind of decadence and hedonism."

Now I've got a soft spot for hedonism, but I understood where Berry was coming from.

We joked about the 90 percent of SUV owners who don't take their vehicles off road. "They've never even gotten mud on their tires," he said.

The point of my Comment was to keep people from want.

Berry's point was to address their wants.

"We must figure out what we need locally," he said, and "how to go about securing it. This would carry you to a literal conservatism and a real...