80-dollar jeans and morality.....
The discussion of the morality of buying 80-dollar jeans is getting a tad testy. Which is not surprising, because it's a discussion of a many-sided unanswerable question. I'm not foolish enough to think I have an answer to offer.

Suppose I refuse to spend $80.00 (or $150.00) on a pair of designer jeans. Not a single starving child or starving adult will be any better off because I've done that.

Suppose I refuse to spend $80.00 or more for a pair of designer jeans, and I buy a pair at a thrift shop for $10.00 and give the $70.00 I've saved to Heifer International, where it will go toward providing a hungry family somewhere [including poverty-stricken areas in the United States as well as all around the world] a cow or a pig or some chickens. I've helped one family a little bit -- not much, but a little bit -- and because HI requires those who are given domestic animals to give the first offspring of those animals to another family, I may have helped more than one family a little bit. But hey.... there are millions of people in desperate poverty. It's a drop in the bucket, right?

Suppose I insist on spending $20.00 for a pair of jeans at a store like WalMart so I'll have the $60.00 to give to Heifer International. Good for the family HI gives the animals to .... but whoever made those $20.00 jeans for WalMart is being paid far too little, and everybody knows WalMart is wicked, right? Now I've encouraged a wicked corporation by buying its products and helping it go on underpaying its employees (and giving them totally inadequate benefit packages) and destroying mom-and-pop stores all over the country. Never mind that I know people whose kids would have no jeans if it weren't for WalMart, and lots of people who'd have no jobs at all if it weren't for WalMart. Surely that's irrelevant.

And then there's the fact that, as my mother always (and often) said, it's not fair to punish rich people for working hard and making money and getting ahead in the world and looking after themselves. People who do those things are entitled to buy $80.00 jeans if they want to; it's their money, they've earned it by their honest labor, and they're entitled to spend it as wisely or as frivolously as they like. While other people were sitting around bitching because they only had a job at WalMart and were never going to be able to afford $80.00 jeans, those people -- the rich ones -- were out working 18-hour days and two or three jobs if that's what it took, and refusing to settle for staying poor. Why should they be punished for that? Plus, they have to bear the burdens that come with wealth (a topic I'll come back to another time, because things are already complicated enough in this post). They deserve 80-dollar jeans.

Some months back we had a heated discussion here about the idea that giving people fish feeds them for a day but teaching them to fish equips them to feed themselves thereafter. Which means that when I help Heifer International give a family a cow I'm really doing that family harm, because they didn't earn that cow, right? How will they ever learn, if people keep giving them things?

Where is the end of the string you pull to straighten out this mess? I don't know. I have a feeling that education (by which I do most emphatically not mean the "No Child Left Behind" program) is the end of that string, but that's just my guess; I may be totally wrong.

Still, tangled as I am in all this mess ... I sincerely thank you for your comments, and for being willing to participate in the discussion.