Yet another example of why Free Trade doesn't work. Free trade is bullshit. I will never let anyone tell me its good. I cringed like mad when I heard Barack Obama say, "I believe in Free Trade, I believe in capitalism."
WHY?! Why believe in it? Is it only because we're on the winning end? Bottled water is a perfectly good example of why corporations should not be allowed to make money in whatever way they see fit. Stealing water out from underneath the people who need it in order to put it in expensive bottles is NOT in the interest of the people. Tap water is practically free, and its just as good. If water quality in your town is an issue, then the answer is NOT to steal someone else's water.
Profit on the scale of Nestle and Coke always comes with loss of human liberty, enviornmental degradation, and a departure from thrifty, practical living. How have Nestle and Coke managed to sell something to us that we could get for free from a tap? I'll never know.
The argument in favor of advertising is that it keeps consumers informed about products, therefore making markets more competetive. Competetive markets maximize welfare. The argument against advertising is that it creates a demand for a product that is unnatural, or irrational.
I really wish I didn't have to fight this battle. Bottled water should be outlawed.
Get your own town, school, office or what have you, to kick the bottle and you'll do a big favor for the environment and human rights at the same time.
This reminds me. on Saturday Baba Ganoush played a show at a diabetes walk. We just played barefoot in the grass with no microphones, but everyone seemed to enjoy it. I think we played angeline the baker five times. Anyway, the radio announcer who oversaw the event said that one of the corporate sponsors was Coca-Cola!
If you didn't know, Type 2 Diabetes is a preventable disease caused by too much sugar intake. Coke spends 99.9% of its time trying to make everyone buy their pure corn syrup liquid, and .1% trying to cure diabetes?
All this corporate greed is tearing me apart inside.
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3 comments:
Now be fair, Adam.
There's no way that Coca-Cola spends anywhere near 0.1% of its time trying to cure diabetes.
Do the math: a typical work year for a full-time employee is 2000 hours (it's actually probably less, but it's a good round number). 1% of that figure is 20 hours, so 0.1% of that figure is 2 hours.
What are the odds that every employee at Coca-Cola spends a whole two hours a year working on a cure for diabetes?
Paying for bottled water is nuts. Especially in America, where we have pretty close to the best drinking water in the world. (Did you know that when they have competitions to see how good water tastes, New York City water is the perennial winner?)
Of course, you could argue that paying for Diet Coke is as irrational as paying for water, except that Diet Coke does provide something you can't get without paying for it: the taste of Diet Coke. You may not agree that it's something worth paying for, but it's not nothing, which is what you're buying when you pay for bottled water.
I agree with you that Coca-Cola or Pepsi does not do amazing things for the world. I also agree that capitalism has lots of problems, and that free trade is not a cure-all. However, I do believe in capitalism and free trade, partly because I don't see any great alternative (I think European-style socialism is fine and better than pure free market capitalism, but they are essentially capitalist countries too), and partly because I believe that they have been a force for good, particularly in several Asian countries. I don't want to go on and on, but I'll give a few examples, and somebody who's better informed can rebut if s/he wants: In China, principally since the country started moving more in the direction of capitalism, some # of hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty (in the maoist Great Leap Forward, I read, some 20 million chinese perished, although I can't vouch for that figure). Also, in Bangladesh, finding work in what we would consider sweatshop conditions (but which, for better or for worse, are much better than the limited alternatives available there) has been a great boon especially to women, who have used their earning power to improve their position socially and even to take more control over their own fertility (again, since it's been a while since I read much about this, the details are fuzzy here, but I have no doubt about the big picture. This is the main problem that I have about the whole push to avoid free trade (in the international sense) and to buy local goods: doing so doesn't help Americans much, and it certainly hurts people who live in much poorer conditions and who could really benefit from the work that free trade brings them. You can't tell them to buy locally, because there's not much for them to buy and they don't have the money to buy it if there's no international trade.
Now, this doesn't mean that we should all be buying bottled water. I actually do, but I also recycle the bottles. I understand that's not perfect. But I do think there can be questions about what's in our tap water (which, by the way, is quite cheap here in the east, but is not free here, and is very expensive in some places). When my son was born, we asked the pediatrician whether we should use bottled water or tap water for the formula. She said either was ok "if you trust New Jersey water, which I don't". I'm inclined to believe the water in VT or MT is much cleaner, given the prevalence of pollution here.
And I think clean coal is one of the more egregious euphemisms to come out of the energy industry since "clean-burning natural gas"...
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