What is the proper wage, do you suppose, for Indonesians mining sulphur from the vents of active volcanos? Is it only their ability to produce it at world market prices (with hidden costs amortized by future, or as yet unborn generations)?
Anyone who looks at economics honestly realizes that it is absent of any moral component. There are no more intrinsic morals in economics than there are in physics. I find it ironic that people who would simultaneously argue that there are moral absolutes, become instantaneously transformed into relativists when it comes to economic matters (the ultimate in relativistic studies), free to ignore any harm as long as it is displaced temporally into the future.
Any pure economic system, e.g. capitalism or socialism, can take on morality that is completely independent of the underlying economic assumption (personal versus group metrics of relative worth of goods and services). You can have moral capitalism, immoral capitalism, moral socialism, and immoral socialism.
When considering true costs of products, it should be obvious to everyone that mercury-intensive mining of gold is not producing the same product using other separation techniques, even though the end product may appear very similar by most physical tests.
Economics is dynamic and therefore, large-scale market inefficiencies can and do exist. To ascribe a pure moral state to one system (capitalism) and immoral status to another (collectivism) is inane without using moral relativism (it's okay to poison Indonesians, but not Americans). |
