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Given a choice between own-brand towels and towels produced under fair-trade principals [sic] which would you rather buy? And would you be willing to pay a premium price for the privilege of buying fairtrade cotton products?

Given a choice between own-brand towels and towels produced under fair-trade principals [sic] which would you rather buy? And would you be willing to pay a premium price for the privilege of buying fair-trade cotton products?

—from an economics textbook’s list of hypothetical questions

The second question here is what gets me. I’m not sure if I’m experiencing some kind of aporia or what, but it seems to me that nobody would want to pay a premium price “for a privilege”, except the priveleged; it smells like facile liberal repetitio ad ignorantium BS. 

Presumably (to get this out of the way as quickly as possible) being thus privileged would already entail a readiness to take advantage of that privilege—which means that yes, of course I would rather buy under “fair trade principles”, because Capitalism and Liberalism function successfully only under “legitimate” moral pretexts. 

And yet don’t we still get immediately lost upon this admission? Because the implication of ‘paying for a privilege’ involves having enough money to pay for that privilege, the crux of that question as it applies to the rest of society, is borderline irrelevant; it translates to: if you could afford to purchase dreams, would you? The other, supposedly unnecessary-to-be-posed question is, “can you even afford to… ?”

Of course you would. You would be willing—if you could afford it—to pay for anybody’s supposed well-being.

But that scenario does not exist. That question, that reference, has no referent. It is an act of Liberal self-delusion, a delusional question that even Marxism does not escape—nor chose to address.