Ruffryder:
You bring up some interesting points that I wish were given more due consideration. One of the books I read in the last six months (I think it was Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist) had a discussion about local sourcing and while it seems like a great idea, it actually can create quite a bit of price inflation. Someone back east set out to create a men's suit using only materials that could be obtained within 50 miles of her home. To be fair she started absolutely from scratch and, if memory serves (I don't have the book with me at work) a suit that would have cost maybe $150 - $200 at a local clothing store was close to $1000 when all was said and done. Another book I'm currently reading (Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature) brings up a really interesting point about trade and that is that it appears to create a more peaceful world. Why bomb someone at great expense when you can trade with them and get the things they have that you want at a fraction of the cost?
People who have studied how humans have become less violent over time (and despite what you might think humans are *far* less violent now then even a century ago) have noted two things. Trading partners tend not to go to war with one another and democracies tend not to go to war with one another. So while the idea of local sourcing and buying local might seem like an intuitively obvious idea, it may turn out that there are hidden costs. This is NOT a defense of globalization nor is it a defense of unregulated capitalism.
Another problem I see with our quickness to grasp onto local sourcing and buying local as a panacea is that it ignores what happens when trade is diminished. Let's say you live someplace where there's plenty of minerals but not a lot of good farmland. I live someplace where there's not a lot of minerals but lots of farmland. Now, if you trade your surplus minerals with me and I trade my surplus food with you, you have the food you can't grow yourself and I have the minerals I can't dig out of the ground. But what happens if I stop trading with you? Well, I still have all this food but I don't need to grow as much anymore. If I'm no longer selling for a large market, I don't need all the extra hands around. So I lay them off. Likewise, since you don't need nearly as many miners if you aren't trying to get enough minerals out of the ground to trade for other goods you lay them off. Now, we've done the right thing and we've shrunk our footprint. We are now only doing business locally but we're doing *less* business. Every person I lay off is one person who doesn't have money to stop by the bar and buy a couple of beers after a hard day. Every person you lay off is someone who isn't going to eat at the diner during their lunch hour. So the diner lays off someone. That person isn't going to go to the tailor and buy a new dress. So the tailor lays off someone. That person isn't going to be buying a car from the used car dealership, so they lay off someone.
We can't say that the economy doesn't behave that way because, in fact, we are in a recession *precisely* because the economy *does* behave that way. There's a crisis on Wall Street and businesses either fold or contract. The people who lose their jobs aren't spending at the lunch counters, bars and little shops surrounding the business districts so some of those businesses also fold. People who keep their jobs seriously contract their spending in case they are the next one's to get a layoff notice. More jobs are lost. And the cycle feeds on itself.
This is why I am so very, very frustrated that the GOP is pretending that a Keynesian stimulus would be nothing but a waste of money and energy. If people are hired to start repairing schools, bridges and roads those will be construction workers who have money in their pocket. Knowing that it's going to take a while to do the job and there'll be more work because there's a lot of roads to be repaired and schools to be updated, so they spend at the bar or the tailor or what-have-you. That is part of what is wrong is that the government, the spender of last resort, isn't able to do infrastructure projects NOT because there's no money but because our politics is broken.
I understand the arguments in favor of buying local and to some degree I think that's good. My wife and I, for instance, have committed to not eating out of season so there won't be bananas in January for us. On a limited scale this works and as an act of conscience I applaud it. However, I think that we need to be mindful of the ripple effects of economic actions. What might seem to be a self-evidently great idea may, in light of deeper reflection, have hidden costs that may be higher than we should want to pay.
How many here would be willing to have the cost of most everything--certainly their electronics, clothing and food--to double? Triple? Would this really help the poor if suddenly a $700 bare-bones laptop suddenly became a $2100 laptop because every component had to be made within 100 miles? What about those objects that have no physicality? Do we local source that stuff as well? When I upgraded to OS X Lion I didn't touch a DVD, I downloaded it. I don't know nor do I care *where* those bits came from. Should we local source those items like software, books and music that have no physicality to them?
Cheers
Aj
Quote:
Originally Posted by ruffryder
Easier said than done, shop local. Do not shop Wal-Mart or go to McDonald's. You can only shop local if there is local farmers. There are not a lot! I went to a local grocery store, but guess what, it gets it's food from the same place Wal-Mart does and it was more expensive. Farmers sell their product to Wal-Mart and other major grocery stores because there is money in it for them. Why sit outside at a farmer's market all day and hope for someone to buy their stuff when a grocery chain will buy in bulk and take all the crop. I worked wholesale meat and produce for 8 years. We bought bulk from farmers and sold to grocery stores, restaurants, and schools. So farmers stuff does actually make it into stores and around town and stays in the U.S. McDonalds buys their beef from local farmers. . . I also worked 6 years in beef production. We got our cattle from local feed lots, slaughtered them, cleaned them up and distributed the meat to McDonalds and other major restaurants and grocery chains. We even shipped to Japan and handled organic meat for the customers that wanted it. I worked Quality Assurance so I know what is in the meat and how safe it is when it comes out of a meat plant. I have taken many tours from where the cattle comes from to how it is slaughtered, packaged, and shipped. You may not want to shop Wal-Mart or McDonalds, however you should research where they actually get their product from because some of it is from local farmers and from the U.S. We may not like McDonalds and Wal-Mart but they do provide many jobs for people in the U.S. Just a thought..
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