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posted by mpawlo
on Wednesday August 28, @11:18AM
from the miscellaneous dept.
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This is not your regular Greplaw report on cyberlaw, but any news concerning the regulation of coffee should be of interest to all greplawers. Rick Young wants a ban on coffee not grown in a fair-trade and organic way. Young is convinced today's prices on regular coffee is not in line with the societal costs. Rick Young recently graduated from the University of California at Berkeley's law school.
'People should pay a price for their coffee that reflects the larger
costs, like polluting water and cutting trees, Mr Young says to The Economist. Prices now
are artificially low because they don't take into account all the
externalities.'
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< The Dark Sides of the Internet
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Banning Bad Java
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The Fine Print:
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them.
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This new law is being proposed, appropriately enough, in the People's Republic of Berzerkeley...
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I think consumers should have to deal with the externalities that their purchases entail. Of course, it is difficult to determine precisely what sort of economic damage various agricultural chemical and labor conditions will cause in dollar terms. However, on a much more pragmatic level, we, as intelligent beings, should want to minimize the amount of suffering and blatant pollution of the environment caused by our consumption -- therefore we should seek out fair-trade, organic coffee on this principle alone.
Just because the slave labor, chemical dumping, and other atrocities take place thousands of miles away doesn't mean we're allowed to pretend they don't exist. Of course, it's all too easy to just that, and the vast majority of Americans certainly do. This is the same sort of ethical laziness that is at the cause of the rash of bad technology laws -- technologists care about the issues because they effect us in a way that is plain as day. But the average person would not really know the difference until Ashcroft actually knocks on the door with a warrant under the new Jail All Napster Users law. In a way, then, this story is related to the ideas of activism, politics, and ethics that exist in all of our tech law debates.
M
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Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be
lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
- Isaac Asimov
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