Here's a thought provoking piece from Sojourners. Do we have any idea what the true cost of our consumption is? Ignorance truly is bliss, as we carelessly drive our economy, the environment, and the living standards of hundreds of thousands of people - including ourselves - right to the brink. What if we had to pay the full cost of a product - any product?

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Everyday low prices are part of our American birthright. Right?

When we take a vehicle for repair, we get a bill that says something like, "Parts $55. Labor $300." What if the price tag of every item we bought broke down the cost that way? One of Karl Marx's more reasonable ideas held that the value of a commodity was comprised of the labor that went into it. Today we might add to that calculation the environmental damage. If we think of prices that way, when I confront a $300 personal computer or a $20 pair of blue jeans, I am witnessing a robbery. And when I buy it, I am an accomplice. But we rarely think about that because we have come to expect those everyday low prices as our American birthright and to believe that our consumer economy would grind to a halt if we ever had to pay the true price of our commodities.

Someday, if the earth survives our petroleum binge, people may look back at archived editions of early 21st-century consumer catalogs and think that same thought. "It's amazing what you can afford when you don't have to pay for the labor." Of course, our slaves are mostly in China, but the distance only makes us more vulnerable to the corruption of our unearned loot.

My favorite line comes at the end:

The point here is that when we don't pay the real price for things, we don't appreciate them, and, worse, we become addicted to filling our days with the acquisition of cheap disposable items...

The slaveholders of the 19th century left neo-classical monuments to their crimes. Our monuments will be giant heaps of broken plastic and crumpled shrink-wrap.