Fair trade coffee is largely a marketing scam: you cannot increase the income of input producers (farmers) by raising the final output price, because there is no way to 'push uphill' on the production chain even if everyone in it has goodwill.

Any fair trade premium will be dissipated by rent-seeking: if you raise the effective price of coffee, more poor people will compete to grow it, so the group collectively spends more resources chasing the transfer than the transfer is worth, wasting real resources.

Costco's higher pay relative to Walmart is best explained by a supply-side business model that needs higher-skilled workers (not altruism), with the marketing 'we pay better' message as a secondary demand-side benefit; the two effects are not mutually exclusive.

Prosperity comes from the division of labor, which is far harder to apply in agriculture (as Adam Smith noted) than in industrialized production; therefore subsidizing developing nations to stay in agriculture is a self-defeating development strategy.

The fair trade impulse reflects a 'human zoo' mentality—wanting poor farmers to remain in picturesque traditional occupations for the observer's pleasure rather than letting them industrialize and earn enough to send their children to school.

A key reason coffee farmers receive low prices is government-created monopsony: many governments make a state organization the only legal buyer of coffee, then resell on the world market, keeping the price paid to farmers down.

Buying stock in a multinational corporation building a manufacturing plant in a poor country would help its workers more than fair trade premiums, because the capital-intensive enterprise raises the marginal product and wages of factory workers, and as people leave coffee plantations for factories, coffee workers' wages get bid up too.

Keeping multinational manufacturing firms out of poor countries cannot help workers even if those labor markets are uncompetitive and exploited, because at the margin having fewer job opportunities can never make workers better off.

Following Hayek, society may legitimately guarantee a minimum subsistence to workers who lose jobs through morally arbitrary economic change, but must never guarantee their existing income stream, because doing so insulates people from forecasting and adapting to the dynamic process that generates prosperity.

Environmental and labor-safety regulations are luxury goods: poor people worried about feeding their families tomorrow rationally prefer higher take-home pay over safer conditions, so such regulations only emerge once a middle class of sufficient size demands them politically—and cannot be successfully imposed from outside.

Imposing US safety regulations on poor-country workers is arrogant paternalism, and the labor/environmental-standards provisions of trade agreements are really a 'bootleggers and Baptists' arrangement: protectionists wanting to keep US jobs use the moral language of caring about poor workers as cover.

The claim that the US has 'shipped jobs to China' is misleading; China itself lost the most manufacturing jobs between 1990 and 2000 because handloom workshops were replaced by mechanized factories, illustrating that productivity, not trade, destroys jobs in both countries.

Increased economic and political interdependence from trade agreements makes the US more likely to get along with countries (e.g., in Latin America) that otherwise distrust it.

Coffee dependency has become a large part of American culture over the last ten years.

People who object to not-euvoluntary transactions persist in their opposition even after being shown the ban makes the worst-off party worse off, because their real objection is preferring not to live in a world where such things are monetized—it functions as a preference, not a factual error.

Economists' standing assumption behind 'voluntary' is a background context of enforceable property rights; without them, even a wallet handed over at gunpoint could be called voluntary, so euvoluntary exchange must rule out the gun-and-wallet case.

The man in China sold his kidney for about $3,000 to buy an iPad and a laptop, illustrating a real not-euvoluntary organ sale.

People objected to the Raleigh ice sellers and clapped at their arrest not out of confusion about getting ice, but because they did not want to live in a world where people can profit from exploiting others' misfortune.

The euvoluntary framework may be analyzing the contents of an empty box because there are essentially no perfectly euvoluntary exchanges, but the ideal type is still useful for understanding people's reactions and diagnosing which non-euvoluntary transactions should be allowed.

Some of these beer cellars in Germany have operated continuously since the 14th century.