What's Your Principle Budget?
And I don't mean "principal budget"; rather, how much extra money do you spend on principle?
For instance: I take inordinate pride in the fact that I've never set foot in a Wal*Mart. I don't even visit Target unless absolutely necessary-although that has to do more with low tolerance for screeching children and infectious diseases than with intolerable corporate practices. To paraphrase Heinlein, lots of Americans seem to think that we do business with Wal*Mart for the same reason we do business with the Law of Gravitation. But in fact with a little searching around will reveal alternative sources of cheap, mass-marketed goods, although generally not as cheap. The money I'd have saved by patronizing Wal*Mart over Quaint*Little*Corner*Store I tally in my Principle Budget. In practice, I've discovered a much more efficient means of saving money than promoting a soulless, money-grubbing mega-corporation-namely, to buy less crap.
Now avoiding Wal*Mart hardly makes me unique: scads of people refuse to shop at Wal*Mart. I also make it a point to avoid any grocery store that taps their customers for free marketing data via those Bog-awful "shopper's club" cards. You know the scam: the store offers special deals for cardholders only, and then subtly raises the prices on everything else to make up the loss. This choice probably doesn't affect the Principle Budget, except insofar as I would have gone out of my way to buy lots and lots of items on the "special sale" list-and even then, only if I actually needed them in the first place. Presumably, I wouldn't save any money by doing my regular grocery shopping at a shopper's-club supermarket.
Don't know whether anyone outside the USA has to deal with this bullshit, but I'll guess this scourge has spread at least to Canada. Odious corporate shenanigans like this don't respect national boundaries, much like, say, the Ebola virus. Again, for a while I feared that the doing-business-with-the-Law-of-Gravitation postulate would apply to grocery shopping, as store after store jumped on the club-card bandwagon. I was delighted, however, when a new grocery store called Dave's Market recently opened nearby. Dave's is a (smallish) chain, but it has made a big selling point of respecting their customers enough to not force shopper's cards on them. For once an advertising campaign found me directly within the crosshairs of its target demographic.
These examples only apply to choices in making identical or near-identical purchases from different vendors, but of course the Principle Budget idea may be expanded to cover alternatives based on the items themselves. I've been trying to avoid factory-farmed meat as much as is feasible. At a restaurant the distinction is difficult to make, and I seldom buy meat at the supermarket, so I guess the point is moot. On the other hand, I haven't made as much effort to buy environmentally friendly detergents and lawn fertilizers and whatnot, at least as much as my conscience dictates, so clearly the Principle Budget, as a monetary sum, has room to grow.
So I got to thinking of whatever else I may decide to do, or avoid, out of principle, and I found a bunch of grey areas. For example, it is silly to spurn Wagner merely because Hitler liked his music. The reality, however, is more complex. Over his lifetime Wagner penned, in addition to weeks of melodramatic Teutonic operas, a number of viciously anti-Semitic diatribes, and there is some reason to believe that these writings indirectly influenced Nazi ideology. His racial views are not expressed prominently in his musical compositions, and so I don't really think about Wagner's anti-Semitism when I hear one of his overtures on the radio. In contrast, I have been much less inclined to read Orson Scott Card's science fiction after I discovered he was a narrowminded, sanctimonious bigot (though I'd already received a strong initial push in that direction upon reading The Memory of Earth, a barely-disguised retelling of the First Book of Nephi in The Book of Mormon). What's the difference between Wagner and Card? Is it that Card is contemporary, or is it my personal experience with pervasive Mormon prejudice? I don't really know for sure.
It also startled me to realized that the art-vs.-politics issue applies in the inverse, as well. I love Green Day's political views; pity I detest their music. Similarly, given the vast upsurge in popularity of atrocious "modern rock" over the past decade and a half, when I heard that Pearl Jam was touring against Bush in "Vote for Change," I figured Kerry had the 2004 election in the bag; but as we saw in Ohio, there are some forces of evil that mere crappy music cannot hope to defeat.
For instance: I take inordinate pride in the fact that I've never set foot in a Wal*Mart. I don't even visit Target unless absolutely necessary-although that has to do more with low tolerance for screeching children and infectious diseases than with intolerable corporate practices. To paraphrase Heinlein, lots of Americans seem to think that we do business with Wal*Mart for the same reason we do business with the Law of Gravitation. But in fact with a little searching around will reveal alternative sources of cheap, mass-marketed goods, although generally not as cheap. The money I'd have saved by patronizing Wal*Mart over Quaint*Little*Corner*Store I tally in my Principle Budget. In practice, I've discovered a much more efficient means of saving money than promoting a soulless, money-grubbing mega-corporation-namely, to buy less crap.
Now avoiding Wal*Mart hardly makes me unique: scads of people refuse to shop at Wal*Mart. I also make it a point to avoid any grocery store that taps their customers for free marketing data via those Bog-awful "shopper's club" cards. You know the scam: the store offers special deals for cardholders only, and then subtly raises the prices on everything else to make up the loss. This choice probably doesn't affect the Principle Budget, except insofar as I would have gone out of my way to buy lots and lots of items on the "special sale" list-and even then, only if I actually needed them in the first place. Presumably, I wouldn't save any money by doing my regular grocery shopping at a shopper's-club supermarket.
Don't know whether anyone outside the USA has to deal with this bullshit, but I'll guess this scourge has spread at least to Canada. Odious corporate shenanigans like this don't respect national boundaries, much like, say, the Ebola virus. Again, for a while I feared that the doing-business-with-the-Law-of-Gravitation postulate would apply to grocery shopping, as store after store jumped on the club-card bandwagon. I was delighted, however, when a new grocery store called Dave's Market recently opened nearby. Dave's is a (smallish) chain, but it has made a big selling point of respecting their customers enough to not force shopper's cards on them. For once an advertising campaign found me directly within the crosshairs of its target demographic.
These examples only apply to choices in making identical or near-identical purchases from different vendors, but of course the Principle Budget idea may be expanded to cover alternatives based on the items themselves. I've been trying to avoid factory-farmed meat as much as is feasible. At a restaurant the distinction is difficult to make, and I seldom buy meat at the supermarket, so I guess the point is moot. On the other hand, I haven't made as much effort to buy environmentally friendly detergents and lawn fertilizers and whatnot, at least as much as my conscience dictates, so clearly the Principle Budget, as a monetary sum, has room to grow.
So I got to thinking of whatever else I may decide to do, or avoid, out of principle, and I found a bunch of grey areas. For example, it is silly to spurn Wagner merely because Hitler liked his music. The reality, however, is more complex. Over his lifetime Wagner penned, in addition to weeks of melodramatic Teutonic operas, a number of viciously anti-Semitic diatribes, and there is some reason to believe that these writings indirectly influenced Nazi ideology. His racial views are not expressed prominently in his musical compositions, and so I don't really think about Wagner's anti-Semitism when I hear one of his overtures on the radio. In contrast, I have been much less inclined to read Orson Scott Card's science fiction after I discovered he was a narrowminded, sanctimonious bigot (though I'd already received a strong initial push in that direction upon reading The Memory of Earth, a barely-disguised retelling of the First Book of Nephi in The Book of Mormon). What's the difference between Wagner and Card? Is it that Card is contemporary, or is it my personal experience with pervasive Mormon prejudice? I don't really know for sure.
It also startled me to realized that the art-vs.-politics issue applies in the inverse, as well. I love Green Day's political views; pity I detest their music. Similarly, given the vast upsurge in popularity of atrocious "modern rock" over the past decade and a half, when I heard that Pearl Jam was touring against Bush in "Vote for Change," I figured Kerry had the 2004 election in the bag; but as we saw in Ohio, there are some forces of evil that mere crappy music cannot hope to defeat.