{"id":47065,"date":"2019-02-26T05:00:04","date_gmt":"2019-02-26T10:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=47065"},"modified":"2019-02-25T13:43:10","modified_gmt":"2019-02-25T18:43:10","slug":"laissez-faire-versus-fairtrade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/02\/26\/laissez-faire-versus-fairtrade\/","title":{"rendered":"Laissez-faire<\/em> versus “Fairtrade”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the Guardian<\/em><\/a>, a sad tale of the fading bright hopes of the (relatively small number of) affluent westerners who passionately supported the “Fairtrade” movement:<\/p>\n

When, in 2017, Sainsbury\u2019s announced that it was planning to develop its own \u201cfairly traded\u201d mark, more than 100,000 people signed a petition condemning the move. Today, on the eve of Fairtrade Fortnight, the fact that most supermarkets have moved away from the standards developed by the Fairtrade Foundation is worrying.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nWhile some grocery chains have sought the foundation\u2019s stamp of approval, many have gone their own way. This means most consumers have little sense of which organisation is doing what to protect the wages and rights of developing world workers. Over the next two weeks, the foundation plans to focus its publicity efforts on cocoa farmers in west Africa and the way the Fairtrade mark can improve their lives.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

That is a sad situation. After the great financial crash of 2008, a commodity boom that lasted from 2013 to 2017 turned into a slump that has robbed farmers and developing world governments of vital cash. Just as they were managing to stabilise their finances and set aside money to invest, the world price tumbled and wiped out their profit. Fairtrade practices protect farmers from this sort of setback and allow them to plan for the future.<\/p>\n

Of course they have their critics. These are most mostly from the US \u2013 people who favour unfettered markets and seek to undermine the Fairtrade ideal, saying it is a form of protectionism that dampens innovation and ultimately ruins farms.<\/p>\n

Theirs is an almost religious adherence to the free market that discounts the gains in stability and security that Fairtrade provides, and the scope of the community premium to promote universal education and the rights of women.<\/p>\n

But without large employers making strides to adopt the standardised and transparent Fairtrade practices put forward by the foundation, it will be left to consumers to drive the project forward.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the Continental Telegraph<\/em>, Tim Worstall<\/a> responds:<\/p>\n

The Guardian tells us that the Great White Hope of global trade, Fairtrade, isn\u2019t in fact working. On the basis that no one seems to be doing very much of it. To which the answer is great \u2013 for the only fair trade is laissez faire.<\/p>\n

This does not mean that Fairtrade should not have been tried \u2013 to insist upon that would be to breach our basic insistence upon the value of peeps just getting on with doing what they want, laissez faire itself. But the very value of that last is that we go try things out, see whether they work and if they don\u2019t we stop doing them. If they do then great, we do more of them.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

So, trying out Fairtrade, why not? Let\u2019s go see how many other people feel the same way? In exactly the same way we find out whether people like Pet Rocks, skunk or Simon Cowell. Product gets put on the market we see whether it adds to human welfare or not. If people value it \u2013 and revealed preferences please, by actually buying it \u2013 at more than the use of those scarce resources in other uses then that\u2019s adding to human welfare and long may it thrive. If it doesn\u2019t, if it\u2019s subtracting value from the human experience, then we\u2019ll stop doing it as those trying go bust.<\/p>\n

This is not an aberration of the system it is the system and it\u2019s why laissez faire<\/em> works. Peeps get to do whatever and we keep doing more of what works, less of what doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Fairtrade? No, I never thought it was going to work as anything other than virtue signalling for Tarquin and Jocasta but that\u2019s fine. Why shouldn\u2019t Tarquin and Jocasta gain their jollies by virtue signalling? As it turns out, now that we\u2019ve tried it, no one else gives a faeces<\/em>*. So, we can stop. Except, obviously enough, for those specialist outlets like the Co Op where the odd can still gain their jollies. It being that very mark of a laissez faire<\/em>, liberal, society that the jollies of the odd are still catered to in due proportion to the desire for them.<\/p>\n

*From Gibbon, all the fun stuff\u2019s in Latin.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Guardian, a sad tale of the fading bright hopes of the (relatively small number of) affluent westerners who passionately supported the “Fairtrade” movement: When, in 2017, Sainsbury\u2019s announced that it was planning to develop its own \u201cfairly traded\u201d mark, more than 100,000 people signed a petition condemning the move. Today, on the eve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[362,4,831,25],"tags":[484,924,817,266,1238],"class_list":["post-47065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-britain","category-business","category-economics","tag-competition","tag-farming","tag-laissez-faire","tag-protectionism","tag-virtuesignalling"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-cf7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47065"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47067,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47065\/revisions\/47067"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}