New School Politics

Meet The Flintstones

Ryan | 13 09 2007

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From the LA Times, here’s something you don’t see every day:

Nelson is a former corporate executive who can afford to dine at four-star restaurants. But she prefers turning garbage into gourmet meals without spending a cent.

…

Nelson, 51, once earned a six-figure income as director of communications at Barnes and Noble. Tired of representing a multimillion dollar company, she quit in 2005 and became a “freegan” — the word combining “vegan” and “free” — a growing subculture of people who have reduced their spending habits and live off consumer waste. Though many of its pioneers are vegans, people who neither eat nor use any animal-based products, the concept has caught on with Nelson and other meat-eaters who do not want to depend on businesses that they believe waste resources, harm the environment or allow unfair labor practices.

…

Freeganism was born out of environmental justice and anti-globalization movements dating to the 1980s. The concept was inspired in part by groups like “Food Not Bombs,” an international organization that feeds the homeless with surplus food that’s often donated by businesses.

…

Adam Weissman, whose New York group Freegan.info has been around for about four years, lives with his father, a pediatrician, and mother, a teacher. The 29-year-old is unemployed by choice, taking care of his elderly grandparents daily and working odd jobs when he needs to. The rest of his time is spent furthering the freegan cause, he said, which is “about opting out of capitalism in any way that we can.”

Of course their utter disregard for morality and open opposition to the productive process is lamentable, to say the least, but I also must question the label of “wasteful” that they attach to consumerism and capitalist activity.

Economic agents measure their resourcefulness in dollars and cents. Whether they are making more money than they spend represents whether they are producing more than they spend. It’s naive to say it constitutes waste when food is thrown out or plastics aren’t recycled, etc., because that statement lacks economic perspective. Within the full context the food and the other materials that are disposed of are mostly thrown away because that is the most efficient way of dealing with them.

Doubtlessly, it would be far more costly to force people to consume everything they buy or to recycle what they do not consume. Why? Because, in addition to the fact that on an aggregate level the process of recycling is far more costly than garbage disposal, conserving and recycling imposes an added burden on the people whose time and labor it requires.

If the “Freegans” got their way and no one threw out anything there would be far more waste–waste of time and labor–which is far more consequential then the cold cuts that have reached their expiration date.

Hence, we know that the Freegan solution to “waste” would be far more wasteful because of its ridiculous opportunity cost and because it reflects negatively on people’s bottom line. I can be confident that at present people are generally resourceful when allocating all of their because the incentives are there for them to be. If they waste too much of their material wealth than they will live less comfortably, if they waste too much of their time they will make less money, if they waste too much money they will have less to buy. There is general accountability, meaning that people incur the costs and benefits of their habits so they will be less likely to be unproductive and wasteful.

I cannot say the same of freegan socialism.

ADDENDUM: Here is a link I was fed to another environmentalism movement who, although somewhat different, share the same distaste for earthly and material pleasure. They call themselves “vegansexuals”:

These people are now commonly known as vegansexuals. Alongside not eating meat, they are also choosing not to be sexually intimate with non-vegan partners whose bodies, they say, are made up of dead animals.

Its an amusing story. All I can say is that I could think of few romantic habits that could inflict greater misery. (HT: Simmons)