Next time, take Econ 101 first
The background of MIT’s home page features a different “spotlight” group or event every day. Today’s is a promotion of “fair trade” coffee.
Now, I have no objection to people who voluntarily pay more than the going market rate for a commodity. (The bottled-water industry thanks the Lord every day for those people.) But this “fair trade” campaign is (of course) run by a group that also opposes “sweatshop” labor.
There’s a big honking picture of Noam Chomsky at the top of the group’s website, which should give you some idea of how much careful thought went into the “anti-sweatshop” campaign. Maybe this gang should consider reading up on what another MIT professor (who’s since moved to greener pastures ) has to say about the subject.
I’m tempted to launch a campaign to help create jobs for the third-world (and for the poor in America) by shopping only at Wal-Mart.
Update: David emailed to note that “fair-trade” coffee programs tend to ignore non-Latin American coffee growers–namely, the #2 exporter, Vietnam– so the “socially responsible” dollars miss a big segment of the downtrodden growers.
The MIT website doesn’t mention particular countries, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were strictly Latin American. Latin American socialists have historically enjoyed far better marketing than their counterparts in Asia. You can’t spend five minutes on a university thoroughfare without spotting a Che or two, but when was the last time you saw a Ho Chi Minh t-shirt? I blame the beefcake factor: why else would a fair-trade site have a muscular, shirtless Dominican spreading his legs on the front page? (If the site has changed, the original is here. ) WASP coeds of the feeling-guilty-about-Dad’s-money set go ga-ga over Latins – the North Vietnamese just don’t have the same sex appeal.
