After walking around a Maryland shopping mall with my wife last weekend and not making a single purchase, I congratulated myself for not spending any money. 

Then, on Monday, I bought $50 worth of books at eBay's (Nasdaq: EBAY) Half.com and Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN), plus my wife and I had dinner at Outback Steakhouse (NYSE: OSI). It seems I'm provident when it comes to spending money on things I don't want.

There are two forces at work guiding my money habits. One says save; the other, spend. I'm half investor, half consumer. Gratefully, these forces are no longer at war. This arrangement, I've realized, isn't a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde split. An economist might say the two forces are complementary goods, like pencils and paper. They go together. I need both to function properly, and the economy needs both, too.

The twin forces of spending and saving are alive and well in most people. The desire to spend money, however, may not overwhelm the desire to save as much as we believe. Certainly folks lean more one way than the other, and spending provides immediate satisfaction, but let's not give instant gratification more than its due. We're wired to look to the future, anticipate needs, and store goods. It explains the proliferation of refrigerators.

But the field is uneven. We encounter more chances to spend a dollar in a given day than to save it. I'm not talking about stuffing money under the mattress or putting it in a musty passbook savings account. That's always an option, but it's not a form of savings. It's privation. It's also a form of fiscal capital punishment, since inflation kills your money.

I'm talking about chances to actively save our money -- in stocks, bonds, money market accounts, real estate, something alive. These opportunities exist. We have access to an ocean of sea-worthy savings vehicles. We just don't see them as often as we drive by McDonald's (NYSE: MCD), and they lack the bright colors. (Our Short-Term Savings Center is a good resource for finding more "alive" places for your money.) 

This is why it's so important to set up a 401(k), an IRA, or some type of automatic savings plan. We eat dinner automatically, so we should save automatically. Set up more than one account. Give yourself a range of savings opportunities, your own strip mall of savings outlets. Imagine how much more we'd save if, next to the mall I visited last weekend, a developer built an investing theme park. Once you know how to get to the stores, it's easy to go back.

I recently read an old article by Paul Krugman, a Princeton economist who writes for The New York Times, that reminded me that healthy economies rely on a strong component of consumer spending. Picture a nation of consumers terrified to spend money, terrified to take risks, and you've got Japan for the last decade, Krugman points out. That's not saving or providence. It's petrification. Risk is a must for any investor, consumer, or human being. We've got to have it, yet it must be commensurate with potential returns and tolerances to make sense, to be efficient.

Therefore, it's too harsh to take a puritanical view toward consumption since spending channels money into the river of national profits, and therefore national economic health. I have economics to thank for this broader world view, for giving me another way to think about the impact of saving and spending. (My wife says anything that changes my thinking can't be all bad -- even economics.)

More than two-thirds of the gross domestic product -- a measure of all goods and services produced domestically in a given year -- comes from consumer spending. Spending is a good thing. It's the lifeblood of our economic base. Amazon.com and Half.com deserve high marks for finding creative ways to open my wallet.

Recently, investors and regulators have taken up arms against the Wall Street establishment for leading us to the slaughterhouse during the bull market of the late 1990s. Investors poured billions into concepts that talked like companies and products that walked like companies, but were neither.

There's blame to be handed out, but most of it goes to individual investors. Not that Wall Street is snow-white or that regulation -- even basic standards of decency -- wouldn't help, but don't hate a shark for acting like a shark. Wall Street has always been about Wall Street, and its customers, first and foremost, are corporations, not individual investors. This isn't a New York secret.

Besides, money that vanished in junky equity investments served a purpose: raw experience. Still got that 1,000-yard stare? C.S. Lewis said experience is a painful teacher, but by God you learn. I'm being pedantic here, but if you had the misfortune of a painful experience in the last 18 months, you're field-tested now. Unless you're under the bed, you're a better investor. You've got something we can't hand out on a website, something no retailer can take away.

The heavy investment spending might pay dividends in the aggregate. Andy Grove, Intel's (Nasdaq: INTC) chairman, suggested in a recent interview that investors in the latest bull market helped build the nation's growing communications infrastructure, an essential expenditure no government tax could have funded. In the long run, maybe it wasn't such a bad thing. Our spending keeps the hive humming. Our investments move the wheel forward. This country and our markets will provide a new opportunity for tomorrow's better-seasoned investor, one that is lasting.

Have a great day.

Richard McCaffery would like to ask Microsoft why you can't put a period in italics. He doesn't own shares in any company mentioned in this report. The Motley Fool is investors writing for investors.