What is a sustainability wacko? Is there something wrong with promoting sustainability?
Um, not all with promoting, but forcing others to do things that are in line with what is being promoted is the wacko part.
Strong or not, that is exactly the point. There is no way to inspect or accredit the thousands of food producing facilities where the Fair Trade folks claim to work. The same is not true of other things however. UL listings come to mind where they do check samples of all products with the listing. Of course government licensing and accreditation is very much on the quality of Fair Trade. There is one organization: Whole Foods, that is very careful about its suppliers. I would certainly trust their systems over Fair Trade or any from the Government.
sustainability as far as resources are self promoting. IT doesn’t need a campaign. The pricing mechanism inherently takes care of it.
Regarding sustainabillity, I’m sure the fair trders would love this.
Thanks! And welcome to the forums.
Well, basically a sustainability wacko is someone who believes that sustainability makes sense and who promotes the concept. The notion of sustainability is aesthetic nonsense and usually a disguise for socialism. It’s based on the assumption that resources are finite, which is stupid. Resource use is considered “sustainable” when current consumption could continue forever without humans creating new resources or technologies. But obviously humans do employ unceasing ingenuity, so current resource stocks do not have to last forever without being replenished. All resource use has always been unsustainable and always will be. In fact, unsustainability is the very force that creates technological progress. Advocates of sustainability want some sort of stagnant socialist economy that does not require any new input from “the earth”.
I buy and utilize what ever suits me at whatever moment. If you are asking me if I give a second thought if a product was made by commies, nazis, satanists, baby eaters, or whatever the thought simply never crosses my mind. And even if it would it would be for the fact that it would serve a very tangible advantage that I could draw up in my head.
And I certainly don’t buy products for libertariansm, goodness, or capitalism’s sake if that is what you’re asking. That is absolute insanity and probably even flies in the face of the own worthwhile topics that market philosophy even discusses.
“I do only because I only eat organic, and a lot of the things re “Fair Trade”.”
Is that USDA Organic, Oregon Organic or Portland Organic?
I never buy Fair trade because it is invariably more expensive than their rivals.Also fair trade is run by leftist groups including the Nicaraguan solidarity campaign and UK socialist ‘charities’ christian aid and Ofam which campaign ‘against capitalism’.
I don’t because I have no particular desire to hurt poor people.
So the general consensus is that buying a Fairtrade product benefits the poor less than buying an equivalent non-Fairtrade product, so even when the price is the same, it is better to buy non-Fairtrade (i.e. it helps poor people more that way).
I am wondering how far this goes. Forget about all the silly “fair wage” stuff that goes with Fairtrade and just imagine a hypothetical “Freetrade certified” product. Does this change anything, or would you still buy the non-Freetrade product, all else (including price) being equal? What about if you knew for sure that the non-Freetrade was produced by actual slaves?
In other words given two equivalent products of the same price, one that was produced by slaves and one that was produced by voluntary workers, would you specifically choose the one produced by slaves?
Anyone?
On the one hand, I’m thinking obviously it would be better to buy the voluntarily produced coffee, say, rather than a slave-produced one, because if we all buy slave-produced products, it makes slavery more profitable, and that can’t be good.
But on the other hand, when I’m offered a Fairtrade coffee in Costa at no extra price, I say no because I know that the workers that produced the non-Fairtrade coffee are probably worse off than those that produced the Fairtrade coffee. I want my ‘market signal’, as it were, to direct investment towards the people in the direst situation. So hypothetically if Costa sold slave-produced coffee by default, and offered me a voluntarily-produced coffee at no extra price, should I say no, because I want my market signal to direct investment towards people in the direst situation?
Just curious, how in the world would we know if it was made by slaves?
The firm employing voluntary workers shows you convincing evidence that this is the case (obviously in hopes that you boycott them). But will that help the slaves, or hurt them?
There’s a few situations where it might hurt slave-workers. If the company is boycotted enough that a certain plantation/factory shuts down and the only two viable options are joining a roving machete death squad or starving to death. Which one would most of us choose? Granted, death squad membership vs. slave coffee bean picker is subjective, but taking away the coffee been “employment” leaves them with one less choice.