An op-ed in the New York Times advances the possibilitythat by protesting the opening of new Wal-mart stores we are really punishing them for our own sins as consumers:
To claim that people shouldn’t have access to Wal-Mart or to cut-rate airfares or services from India or to Internet shopping, because these somehow reduce their quality of life, is paternalistic tripe. No one is a better judge of what people want than they themselves.
The problem is, the choices we make in the market don’t fully reflect our values as workers or as citizens. I didn’t want our community bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., to close (as it did last fall) yet I still bought lots of books from Amazon.com. In addition, we may not see the larger bargain when our own job or community isn’t directly at stake. I don’t like what’s happening to airline workers, but I still try for the cheapest fare I can get.
Bingo! All the bleeding-heart pro-worker angst in the world goes right out the window when we get the urge to buy a cheap TV at 3AM. Sadly, the column goes straight down the tubes in the very next paragraph:
The only way for the workers or citizens in us to trump the consumers in us is through laws and regulations that make our purchases a social choice as well as a personal one. A requirement that companies with more than 50 employees offer their workers affordable health insurance, for example, might increase slightly the price of their goods and services. My inner consumer won’t like that very much, but the worker in me thinks it a fair price to pay. Same with an increase in the minimum wage or a change in labor laws making it easier for employees to organize and negotiate better terms.
(Emphasis mine) Again we find the inexplicable assertion that the only way to encourage highminded behaviour in people is through the coercion of law. This is the excuse of the spineless, of a man who refuses to take responsiblity for his own decisions and instead fancies himself helplessly tossed about at the mercy of his baser urges.
Agnostic though I am, I am tempted to say this is what happens when you deprecate religion and have nothing to replace it with. What else can explain a man contemplating acts which are, by his own admission, immoral within his personal ethical framework, and instead of expressing contrition and a resolve to do better, calling for government regulation to reign in his own selfish impulses? It’s like combatting rape by regulating the cut of women’s clothing. The possibility of self-control is not even given consideration.
EDIT: The article doesn’t just suggest an author lacking moral backbone, but one deprived of basic logical faculties as well. He claims that adding laws and regulations will “make our purchases a social choice as well as a personal one”. But that’s just the opposite of what it would do. By forcing companies to treat their employees in certain ways, the guilt the author feels for shopping at Wal-Mart would be assuaged, and the prices would be closer to those at other stores. The social aspect would become a lesser factor in the decision of where to shop.
“Animal Farm” came to mind almost immediately.
indeed.
See the edit I just added to the bottom… if it weren’t for the very smart socialist-leaning people I know, I’d think that socialist thought appealed primarily to those incapable of intellectual rigour.
There is a time for this sort of thinking, though it probably doesn’t apply here: prisoner’s dilemma scenarios.
If everyone shopped ethically, the desired changes (eg labor conditions) would happen. However, if only I shop ethically, there will be no discernable change and I will have lost money. If I know that there is an active organized boycott, or if my target is small enough to care about a single customer, then there is a chance for effectiveness, but otherwise I may give up.
Of course, if everyone wants a change, sees no one else doing it, and gives up, nothing will happen.
It’s times like these that make government action a reasonable solution. An alternative solution is to gather together a large number of people who care and get them all to agree on which issues to fight for at a given time. That can work too.
All this breaks down somewhat if (as I suspect is the case) the econmy is dominated by people who honestly don’t care. That’s beyond the scope of this comment, though.
The thing that really floored me about this particular article was that the author framed it in very personal terms, rather than the usual fig-leaf of “you and I know better, but the dumb masses need guidance” – and that as the answer to what he described as a personal problem he immediately jumped to the solution of government action, completely skipping over any discussion of personal responsibility.
I fall into the category of people who don’t care – not out of ignorance or lack of consideration but because I haven’t been convinced that there is an actual problem here. But according to this guy’s logic laws aren’t needed merely to keep people like me in line – rather, even the people who care need laws in order to get them to follow their better judgement. Which strikes me as equivalent to him passing by a beggar on the street and then writing about how there aught to be a law requiring him to give alms to the poor.
What most annoys me about the article is that he doesn’t back up his claim in any way. He says that
and expounds on the consequences and details but he never says why. He just treats it as obvious. I see several possible reasons:
It should perhaps be noted that options two and three can be achieved by other means, but less effectively. There are probably other reasons that I missed as well.
a couple of things…
1. I found this article rather annoying for different reasons… on the whole, I know that Robert Reich is a pretty sharp guy, but I found that the logic in this article seemed entirely lacking.. I think I know what he wants to get at.. but he doesn’t make a convincing argument at all..
The real point that should be made is that the extremely cheap prices that some of these monster firms offer–like Wal-mart–come about because a lot of the costs that they create for communities are not paid by them.. i.e. when they open a wal-mart and it destroys downtown businesses which throws more people out of work here than it employes–and reduces income for cities–the “real” prices that we are paying for those goods is concealed… This is a much more complicated issue, of course, and i will admit that this presentation is not nearly as rich and complicated as it should be.. but that’s more of the gist of it..
Does Reich get this across.. no… and the tone he takes is damn patronizing…
A much better tact–(taking the perspective that you are trying to be sympathetic to his position)–would have been to push the point that these corporations represent a set of values that he finds to be dishonest, immoral, and destructive because of blank, blank, and blank.. and that history has shown us (and here he would need detailed examples to back it up–they are there..) that the most effective way to create a world in which better values are encouraged in our system would be to do this, that, and the other thing….
(the obvious sign of the weakness of his presentation of his argument is that he uses the phrase “only way” to try to push his view…
anyone who gives you only one possibility (in 99.9% of all problems) is misleading you…
As for your temptation.. I find that to be a rather weak argument.. Do you honestly believe that greater appreciation for religion would seriously reduce the number of spineless acts of irresponsibility by people??? Personally, the more people professes their religiosity to me, the more wary I become of them, because in almost all cases, they then go and do something atrocious and don’t see it as so because “they are good people and good people obviously cannot do evil things…
also… my reading of history pretty much tells me that, if anything, the amount of oppresion, random violence, and irrational hatred has staid about the same or decreased over time in certain parts of the world–and this is at the same time as religion becomes less and less of a factor in people’s lives in these areas…
but here.. we are getting back to the old disagreement that you and I have… namely that you believe that people are inherently good while I tend to believe that people are inherently selfish/immorral… I think that Hobbes was absolutely correct in Leviathan.. life in anarchy–the state of affairs in nature–is nasty, brutish, and short… and the only way that you can really combat this is to have enough of a control apparatus that you can actually threaten people into behaving in ways are productive for more than just themselves in the long run…
on this point.. we will, I’m sure, just have to agree to disagree…:)
Re: a couple of things…
please forgive numerous typos… I’m sleepy…
Re: a couple of things…
The article lacks focus as well. He brings up Amazon.com as well, but as far as we know Amazon is cheap because of low overhead and economies of scale, not because they screw their employees. Plus, it’s effect on small local bookstores is arguable: they may be driving as much mail-order business to them through their affiliate program as they ever drove away. My personal experience with small bookstores is that while I like the *concept*, in most cases the actual execution was sorely lacking and deserved to die.
But getting back to the subject at hand: I think the root problem here is not so much one of human behaviour, but rather an old collectivist complaint about markets: that the price system conveys insufficient information. I’m willing to grant this to a certain degree. Prices are an amazingly effective way of boiling down all the important market information about a product into a single number; but there is still some information which consumers may find pertinent which is left out. E.g. given the information, an economically signicant percentage of consumers will choose a higher-priced product if it’s organic, free-range, fair-trade, etc. (otherwise my local stores wouldn’t carry such products).
Personally I believe there are ways to flood the market with this kind of information, in ways which impose no extra burden on the shopper, with little or no government intervention. But that’s a complicated subject that I’m not yet ready to write about.
Re: a couple of things…
the problem with prices is that when they are emphasized as the primary factor to evaluate–i.e. Look at the “cost” more than anything else–then even if you give extra information–most people, in my experience, won’t really give much weight to the factors like organically grown etc etc….
In fact… to go with the wal-mart example–too often I read about situations where wal-mart comes in, downtown of small towns gets destroyed, more people out of work, and the city gov’t costs increase–which pushes them to try increase their revenue by increasing very non-progressive taxes like registration fees etc–which then makes the politicians unpopular and “let’s cut taxes” candidates come in–often republicans that Wal-Mart gives lots of campaign contributions to–and the situaiton just slowly goes to hell… on a large scale–this is what has happened to a vast majority of the state governments over the past decade.. run by Republicans into the ground… but I’m getting off on a tangent here…
This is the long term problem that I see… Americans just don’t seem to register that this kind of situation–akin to always taking the easy way out and pushing off the problems on future generations–is bad…
It is not healthy… (and here I can talk about the fact that there is now tons and tons of information out there about what you need to do to remain healthy–what to eat and what not to–how much exercise to get, etc–and still the number of obese and overweight people keeps growing and growing.. not because they don’t have access to this information.. but because they just lack the resolve and will… or rather.. they aren’t faced with the cost of their actions immediately… so they just wait until they are fucked and then they complain about it …
if I had more faith that these people would, when the shit hits the fan, say.. “ooops, errr, i guess I brought this on myself.. my bad, I’ll just deal with it” without then running to the gov’t to get help. (and here, I’m starting to abstract this tendency to be a kind of attitude towards life–not just eating junk food…).. then I wouldn’t have a problem with this… however.. it always seems to be that when things really take a nose dive–even when the nose-dive is self inflicted–that people go and whine to the gov’t and then taxpayers have to go bail them out.. oil industry in the 1930’s, S&L’s in 1980’s, the oil-shocks of the early 70’s, & the whole depression are all good examples of this…
That pisses me off.. and I’m getting all ranty and philosophical here, for which, I apologize…
It’s just that this all comes down to hypocrisy and spoilt children-syndrome to me… if everyone were as self-consciously responsible as you appear to be.. then I would not worry.. but I don’t think they are,… and that does tend to make me contemplate the sinister benefits of benevolent dictatorships sometimes… (after which, I get irritated with myself…. 😉 )
and this response lacks focus.. sorry.. :\
Re: a couple of things…
Regarding the religion aspect:
First of all, understand that unless otherwise noted when I refer to religion I use the term in an academic, psychological sense. I am talking about religion in the sense that psychologists and maybe anthropologists use it: a personal experience/philosophy/relationship with the divine. I’m not talking about religion from an external historical, political or sociological point of view. I think that may account for a lot of the talking-at-cross-purposes we do when the subject of religion comes up.
As for the way I used it in reference to the article: What lead to that statement was the feeling that if someone had read that in a newspaper a hundred years ago, they would have been shocked by the lack of moral fiber displayed by the author. All actions aside, a strongly moral culture frowns on the idea that anyone is powerless against the temptation to do evil.
Re: a couple of things…
aha.. but here we are getting at another fundamental difference, perhaps, between us that I don’t know if we have discussed.. but one that I have noticed a lot in various conversations with people…..
specifically.. looking at your last sentence… I can never put “all actions aside”…. for me–the sum of a person–and how they should be judged/regarded/analyzed has a lot more to do with their actions than it does with their beliefs and statements… Too often, i find that the problem in our society has less to do with what people claim to believe than with the fact that they claim to believe something and then totally act in a way that is contrary to those beliefs… Namely–Hypocrisy is perhaps one of the greatest “evils” there can be for me… and it is definitely one of the things that I get most angry at myself for… (i.e. in the past, when i have gone to Wal-mart even though I had been bitching about it to others before…)
I think that this view of mine definitely has something to do with my catholic upbringing–one of the very good things that I have ever considered about catholicism is that it makes you put your money where your mouth is–merely proclaiming your goodness is not enough.. it is too easy….
words and language–because they are always inherently in the forms of “representations of reality”/i.e. we assign them arbitrary meanings and their only real connection to these meanings is due to our own professed agreement to understand them this way–lend themselves to lies and deception quite easily when one person decides that they just aren’t going to agree with the society’s definition… With actions this is not nearly so easy… because they are part of reality…not that actions cannot also be used for deception.. but it is a lot more complicated… e.g. I can say that I love someone.. but that really doesn’t mean much if I constantly go and cheat on the person–even though I can profess my love constantly during this time.. I might even believe myself that I love my partner.. but that doesn’t change the fact that my words are going to be interpreted as lies by my partner due to my actions…
as for 100 years ago… don’t buy into the whole grandpa-esque view that “back when I was a kid, people were really moral” etc etc… This is not historically true.. Although you might have had a public culture that supposedly placed higher value on “personal responsibility and virtue” in certain public proclamations.. you also have to realize that this culture was run with built-in hypocritical attitudes.. and one of the biggest ones was that you just don’t talk about “virtuous” people committing vices.. except if they are one of the scapegoat minorities that you are allowed to kick around…
Perfect example.. the ku klux klan was, in the 1910’s and 1920’s, considered to be one of the biggest supporters of virtue–and they went around preaching as such… of course, I could go into the fact that their virtuous, moral fiber condoned lynching blacks and attacking Jews and Catholics anytime they could… but even better is the fact that behind this big moralistic facade, most of the higher klan wizards were just as corrupt as the Catholic bosses and Jewish mobsters that they railed against… In fact, nearly 20% of America had either joined or strongly supported the Klan by the early 20’s… (what a moral time that must have been..) until a huge trial came about where one of the highest Grand Wizards was convicted of abducting, raping, and mutilating an Indiana woman (he bit chunks out of her)… membership tended to drop off after that.. but it was only because someone went through the trouble to broadcast the atrocity that he had committed..
And now I’m rambling, I know… but to get back to my point.. don’t believe the hype about the “good old days”… they weren’t better than today.. it is just that today we get to hear about everyone’s dirty laundry today–and we are forced to deal with the fact that most people seem to be fairly immoral, whereas in the past, they kept it secret… and not generally because they felt it better not to expose people to indecency, but rather, because they didn’t want to get caught and they had the power to keep this from happening…
Re: a couple of things…
I think my perception of the past may be closer to yours than you realize. When I gave the “100 years ago” example it was with the assumption of a more vocally moralistic culture, not necessarily a more actively moral one. I can definitely understand and sympathize with your hatred of hypocrisy – honesty, transparency, and internal consistancy being my core values. At the same time, however, I’m also a big fan of guilt, shame, and public indignation. As someone who is always looking for ways that communities can get along without coercive government involvement, I’m a proponent of power of peer pressure as an effective non-coercive behaviour modification tool.
My feeling is that the liberalisation process went off the tracks at some point. Instead of saying “let’s redefine what’s acceptable so that free love and gay sex is no longer frowned upon”, it turned into “all moral judgment is outmoded; therefore human actions simply *are*, and some of them have to be illegal for the good of the group”. It ties into my general theory that modern liberalisation trends lead to a dichotomy where all actions must be either illegal or perfectly OK, with no grey-area in between – a theory I hope to expound more on at another time.
(Note: none of the above should be construed to mean that I believe in some sort of universal moral baseline, the way most conservatives do. Communities ultimately have to come up with their own standards of right and wrong.)