The high cost of being a cheapskate

Or: why price can't be the only question

Dear L,

Thomas Sowell taught me that economics means dealing with scarcity.

He says the Garden of Eden had lots of production and consumption, but it didn’t quite qualify as an economy. And that's because they had way too much stuff and nobody had to worry about anything. An economy (on the other hand) is where people have to worry — and thus they have to economize. Economics is what happens when people try to get the most of what little they’ve got, and what they can get is far less than what they can dream.

When you fly economy it’s a sign that elbow-room (up in the sky) could mean no food on the table back home. Being bad at economics never meant we didn’t read a textbook. It means we have to burn textbooks to stay warm because we took money and blew it on the wrong things. For a working example of this, please refer to satellite pictures of North and South Korea. Or to rolling blackouts in places like California.

In short, he notes you can be a rich country like Switzerland or Japan and not have that many resources available. And there are countries like Venezuela that have tons of natural resources and still can’t climb out of the dumpster. So the big question of economics was never just “what do you have?” It was always “how do you use it?”

For decades now, Americans have been economizing with a proverbial race to the bottom. We said, basically, that we didn't care if people in Michigan or Ohio had jobs: we would rather pay less money for cars or widgets and have American fat-cats pay slave wages to the Chinese. And when the fat cats got rich selling us cheap widgets and the stock market went up, we said it paid off handsomely. And it did for a while. With the money we saved on cars or clothes or phones we bought lawnmowers, and steaks, and the occasional trip to Puerto Vallarta. We had rules for what you could put in rivers here, and we found that when we put more things in rivers someplace else, we could spend more time and money floating down our clean rivers.

As I said, this worked only for a while. If we look at the quality of American life, almost every aspect has been directly affected by the race to the bottom. Wheat and corn are now made so cheaply and unnaturally that in many cases they can’t even reproduce themselves— not without Monsanto’s help, anyway; and the things we spray them with are so cost-effective and poisonous that everything else dies but the corn. And then we feed these poison-soaked things to our children, and we wonder why Americans are sicker and less hardy today than when we were on the verge of starvation.

Seed oils are made so “efficiently” today that they’re giving us cancer, and making us obese. Cotton became “too expensive,” so now our clothes are made from so many plastics that the oceans are full of microparticles — just like we are now too. Cancer rates are up because of this, and now many of us are at a higher risk of stroke. The very fish we eat — once viewed as a healthy alternative to the cows we’d mismanaged — are now filled with mercury, and plastics, and god-knows-what-else due to pollution. To counter a bad diet we fill people up with cheap meds: a masking up of some symptoms which causes others and lowers quality of life even further.

Food and drugs aside, we didn’t want to pay for news, and now we find that investigative journalism was relegated to fringes and randos. We didn't want to pay for social media, and now our most sensitive personal information is being traded by governments and corporations to manipulate us. We fought hard for basic workers’ rights here and we found that it was cheaper to pay people without rights elsewhere. So for the sake of IPhones, we shipped business to places where the offices have nets installed because the workers keep jumping off them. And now places like Motor City — one-time shining beacons of prosperity — are wastelands.

We opened the border and kept it open for decades — even soldered it open, in some cases — because nobody wanted to pay American teenagers enough to collect our strawberries, or mow the lawn, or clean the toilets. So instead of protecting us from the world with trade barriers, like even The New York Times says the world protects itself from us, Americans decided to bring the third world here. And now we find ourselves wondering if we can climb out of it. Our spending on education has skyrocketed while literacy rates continue to drop. Now we wonder if we can maintain a democracy where a dwindling number can read, or speak English, or even identify with American culture. Now Medicaid and food stamps — two programs that are politically dangerous to cut — mean we have to take money from people, by force, to replace what other people used to be paid in private. We haven't even saved money on medical care in the long run: in fact now we pay more. We've merely shifted who's paying it, and whether they have a choice in the matter.

The big question with tariffs, like the question with RFK's food and medicine reform, isn’t whether the American people need them: it’s whether we think we deserve them. And maybe more importantly, it’s whether we can stomach them. Now that many of the best jobs have been shipped overseas, it’s whether we feel we can afford daily expenses on wages from Burger King and Walmart. When price is the sole criterion with markets and the laws regulating them, we find that the main thing that gets cheapened is us.

The prices are going up due to the tariffs. We have only to see whether the wages will too — and just as importantly, if they’ll catch up before the next big election cycle.

Yours,

-J

P.S. The other big question is, who decides when something is too cheap? In other words, if somebody wants to sacrifice quantity for quality, who are we to choose for them? Is it my right as a citizen of the United States to tell my neighbor that he has to buy top-of-the-line clothing — and that because of this he has to forego car parts, or new furniture, or buy beans instead of steak?

It’s a dangerous game to play, but some of the losses are worth it. I heard this week that studies have already been done on the effects of polyester underwear on dogs. In short, we put cotton underwear on some female dogs and polyester on others, and found that the fertility rate of the cotton wearers remained high and the fertility rate of the polyester wearers tanked. So the big question is, why should we let people be sterilized, or allow their hormones to get mangled, just so they can have cheaper undies? Is it safe for a country to be buying it? Is it right for anybody to be selling it?

It isn’t that choosing what people can and can't buy is easy, or safe. I’m only saying we’re in trouble already. Our birthrates are dropping. Our cancers are rising. Our obesity is crushing. Our jobs are disappearing. Our hormones are deranged, and now the country’s flooded with revolutionary misbreeds. And maybe you’re not free if you don’t have the freedom to fail. But you also can't be free if your health gets wrecked by Monsanto and you don’t have insurance for the doctor.

A free society, at bottom, has to be a strong society. We have focused too much on the choice, and not so much on the quality of the men making the choices.