Wrestling with Starbucks: Conscience, Capital, Cappuccino

Chapter 10: Capitalism Is Like Fire...

203 Capitalism Is Like Fire . . . 10 John Sage, president of Pura Vida Coffee, sat with me in his decidedly un-Starbucks-like Seattle office, located in a low warehouse-style building redolent of counterculture , dimly lit, with bright posters and mismatched furniture, catty-corner from Mermaid Central across the street. “I’m always arguing with my lefty friends, but capitalism as a system is value neutral ,” Sage insisted. “It all depends how you make your money and what you do with the profits.” He was explaining the unique Pura Vida structure, which pairs Pura Vida Coffee, a for-profit, fair trade coffee importer and roaster, with Pura Vida Partners, a charity that holds the coffee company’s voting shares and uses company profits for projects in coffee-growing countries. “Capitalism is like fire,” he told me. “You can use it to cook a great meal, or it can burn down the house.” “Sure, it’s like fire,” said Alec, when I reported the conversation. “If you don’t regulate it, it burns down the house.” My friend Beatrice Edwards countered, “It’s an intelligent fire; it finds its way around the regulations meant to contain it.” “No,” Alec reconsidered, “capitalism is more like molasses. It coats everything and leaves it sticky.” At its core, the Battle of Seattle was about the competing cultures and consequences of capitalism, which in its pure form relies on private enterprise rather than government control to regulate the marketplace. It pitted the WTO framework of free trade and privatization against the global justice vision of fair trade, in which corporate profits took a back seat to human rights, environmental sustainability , and a fairer distribution of wealth. Free-market pedants hold that “no rules is good rules” and that regulation of the marketplace should be avoided at all costs. Opponents argue that free trade has plenty of rules—nine hundred or so pages of them in the North American Free Trade Agreement alone. It’s just that those rules favor the corporations, governments, and individuals who are already rich and powerful. The global monetary establishment holds that the path to all good outcomes is spurred by free-market expansion and that profits trickle down from the top to benefit the masses. The global justice forces claim this approach isn’t working and have catalogued increases in income inequality and environmental destruction to prove their point. Sage straddles the divide, laying claim to the structure of capitalism and the purpose of global justice. Call his approach culinary rather than slash-and-burn capitalism. I, however, have always agreed with that other fence-straddler, the economist John Maynard Keynes, who believed that government regulation was necessary to ameliorate the harms of a totally free market. In his words, “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” My sentiments exactly. How do we get these notions? A colleague who’s been to school more recently than I says that, these days, economics is defined as “the science of how individuals make choices and trade-offs in the face of scarcity.” But for me economics—the way we organize our resources and our labor to meet our needs and enrich our lives—has always been less science and more sociology. Fundamentally, economics is not merely about finance but about ideas, people, and values. Economist Duncan K. Foley has even gone so far as to equate economics with theology . Ever since Adam Smith made his case for free markets, Foley says, economists have adopted the fallacy that “it is possible to separate an economic sphere of life, in which the pursuit of self-interest is guided by objective laws to a socially beneficent outcome, from the rest of social life, in which the pursuit of self-interest is morally problematic and has to be weighed against other ends.” Although I’ve spent most of my life dealing with the consequences of market forces on working people, I’m far from being an 204 W R E S T L I N G W I T H S TA R B U C K S economist. But just as we each have personal politics, we each have an economic story to tell, one that gives meaning to our money and that we use to interpret the world and our place in it. And it...