Frugality vs. justice?

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6 responses to “Frugality vs. justice?”

1. June 21, 2005

   jack perry

   I came across this phenomenon recently. An environmentalist friend of mine commented that he doesn’t mind the higher price of gas; in fact, he’d be happy if gas cost $5/gallon. I concurred, more or less. After all, we’re both rather “enlightened” on such things.

   Later, though, I realized that since my friend’s wife works in sales for a company that provides her with a minivan, and since for $80/month the family can use the van for personal trips, and since the company also pays for the gas on these trips: No wonder he wouldn’t mind if the cost of gas was $5/gallon; his family won’t be footing the bill on their numerous long-distance trips.

   (NB: Sadly, this is a pharmaceutical company we’re talking about. Without meaning to, my friend has taught me a great deal about why medicine costs so much.)

   I, on the other hand, have ridden the bus to work for several years now. Of course, I would would buy tickets if I had to, but the university has an arrangement where students, faculty, and staff ride free. So, I choose to ride the bus 🙂 which also makes me somewhat less sensitive to gas prices.

   The point being: if our livelihood depended on having to ride the car to work every day, because rent & home prices are too high in the city… we might have a more humble point of view, and might have been less prompt to look down our noses at all the people complaining about high gas prices.

   So I’m feeling kinda low. Do I get any credit for the fact that I have been buying the $3/doz eggs?

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2. June 21, 2005

   Joshie

   I have noticed that organic produce has been going down in price recently, but its still not really close to affordable. But can we talk about how much lactose free milk costs too?

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3. June 22, 2005

   who, me?

   I bought some all-natural milk, 40% more expensive, glass container, at the supermarket because that’s all they had. It had no taste, must mean producers have to stint on something in feed that has hormones or antibiotics.

   I’ll buy the cheap polluted stuff next time. I don’t drink much milk, and when I do I don’t want it to taste like water.

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4. June 23, 2005

   Marcus

   How consumers drive the race to the bottom.

   We buy the cheapest goods of acceptable quality.

   Industry does the same. And labor is one of those goods.

   Maybe we should be revisiting that immiseration thesis, eh?

   Post-WW2 pro-capitalist economists used to enjoy pointing at US prosperity and that of the whole Occident, right through the early 1970’s, and laughing at this as another of Marx’s howlers.

   They denigrated the progressive theory that the slow rise of working-class well-being from the 19th century through that time was due to unions, tariffs, and progressive social legislation, including child labor, minimum wage, and wage-and-hour legislation.

   They said wages rise with worker productivity.

   A whole lot of people believed them, and still do.

   Now we see that this is bunk.

   Jones in Kansas and Vasquez in Nuevo Laredo both make the same widget using exactly the same technology and materials, bought for the same price, and their products sell on the same market for the same price.

   Those include the usual offered determinants of worker productivity, and they are the same for both fellows.

   But Jones gets $12 and hour and Vasquez gets $12 a day.

   Or was “worker productivity” just code for “the least employers can get away with”?

   In which case the Marxist theory of immiseration, and the progressive theory of worker prosperity, are both in the running.

   Did I say “Marxist”? How about “Ricardian”?

   Google the “Iron Law of Wages,” for a nasty shock.

   The idea is really core to bourgeois economic theory.

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5. June 23, 2005

   Marcus

   Jack Perry makes a valid point.

   Liberals and enviromentalists who urge taxes to make higher gas prices at the pump are blind to, or just don’t mind, the fact this is a horribly regressive proposal with a potentially devastating impact on workers, especially in cities whose layouts are not conducive to effective mass transit.

   Example: the offices where I work are packed with lowish wage women working clerical occupations who could not make it to the job site any other way than by driving.

   If the rejoinder is that people can and should work at places they can reach without cars, the reply (after a shout of outrage) is that many of the “better” employers for such folk relocate offices frequently, which would then preclude stability and length of service that are still needed in so many businesses to get decent wages, benefits, or a crack at that miseable pension plan.

   A graduated sales tax based inversely on mpg would work out better, since (broadly speaking) the lower the mpg the more expensive and luxurious the car.

   Why do we rarely or never hear such a suggestion from the environmentalists?

   Just another symptom of the estrangement of liberals and “the left” from the working class, I fear.

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6. June 23, 2005

   Joshie

   The only reason a high gas tax is regressive is because of a lack of public transportation in many large cities and a lack of it at all in most rural areas.

   The idea that some cities’ layout is not condusive to public transit is not bourne out by the facts. The reason cities like Indianapolis and Detroit, for instance, have no public transit is because auto-companies paid for these cities to tear up their public transit systems and then sold them buses. This is why there is not transit system in many urban areas, not because of their layout.

   Another factor is that instead of investing in public transit on a national scale, the federal government has invested millions of dollars in the interstate highway system, at the same time gutting funding for passenger rail and expecting it to make money which it never actually will, even without the interstates.

   Ther health costs of pollution need to be taken into account as well. Asthma rates in urban areas are very high, and the amount of money my parents alone spent on my asthma staggers me to think about now. Not to mention the possible effects of global warming and other enviromental problems.

   A gas tax is only regressive because governments at all levels have made poor long-term choices, encouraged by the oil and auto industries. We can never be independent of “foreign oil” simply because we don’t have enough of our own to meet domestic demand. Very few countries do. Iran barely has enough for itself.

   The key to improving transportation costs to the consumer is 1) re-building public transit in the middle of the country and 2) finding alternative sources of energy.

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