lostcarpark: (Default)
lostcarpark ([personal profile] lostcarpark) wrote2004-05-13 12:18 pm

Oneword

[ Trade ]
It seemed like a fair trade. A little bit of life for a whole lot of power. But seemingly simple transactions have a way of complicating themselves. What I wouldn't give to reverse it all now...

Reminded by [livejournal.com profile] hawkida.

[identity profile] ang-grrr.livejournal.com 2004-05-13 04:36 am (UTC)(link)
Trade for me means fairtrade, at least the idea that the transaction involves cost and that these costs should reflect the value of the provider. The problem is that in society as it is we search for the bargain without looking at the wider picture. Buy the dearer coffee. Build a school.

[identity profile] lostcarpark.livejournal.com 2004-05-13 04:44 am (UTC)(link)
Good point. And if I'd had more than a minute to think of it, I might have written something like that. As you say, we pick what seems the cheapest item, without looking at the real cost. We save a few pennies today, but damn the planet tomorrow.

This goes on all the way from our weekly shopping or our choice of where to eat lunch, all the way to government contracts. The result: millions living in poverty, dirt in the air, poisen in the water and how we wish we could back and trade for something else.

[identity profile] etherealfionna.livejournal.com 2004-05-14 04:57 am (UTC)(link)
we pick what seems the cheapest item, without looking at the real cost

Which, incidentally, is the real problem that I have with the Libertarian ideal that government in any form be abandoned: we consistently prove incapable of taking in the bigger picture, even though for most in Western society we have the leisure to do so.