London Calling…

I do not mind paying for things. I am not particularly rich, certainly by NY standards, but I am also distinctly not poor. I am not (in my opinion) particularly cheap. I do not resent paying for things that I want unless I genuinely feel like I am being ripped off, in normal circumstances if I feel something is not worth what I would have to pay for it I simply don’t buy it. Ditto for the many things that are more than worth it but which I clearly cannot afford.

So I find it annoying when people bitch and moan about say, the price of popcorn. Yes, it is blatantly ridiculous to have to pay $8 for a carton of dry disgusting lumps of food with the texture and taste of polystyrene foam. Absolutely agreed. (As you may be able to tell, I hate popcorn anyway). But the exercise of disagreeing with the price of an unnecessary commodity, and I cannot emphasise this enough, intrinsically involves not buying any.

By all means complain about income tax. You have no control over how much you are obliged to pay, what it is spent on once you’ve paid it, and not only do you not have a say but you don’t even necessarily know. But do people not understand how ridiculous it is to stand there and bitch about how it can’t possibly be a dollar fifty for a can of coke while paying for the beverage in question?

Allow me to introduce the concept of worth in economics. What something is worth, is what someone else is willing to pay for it. Is a one dollar umbrella worth $4 in a rainstorm? The answer is probably yes. You are paying a dollar for the umbrella, and $3 for the umbrella _now_. You could have bought it for a dollar yesterday when it was sunny and carried it around. You didn’t, and so you pay $3 for the privilege of not looking like a pillock wandering around the park in the blazing sunshine with an umbrella. The vendor is making $1 for the umbrella, and $3 for standing out in the bloody rain. Don’t want to pay $4? Then there is a very simple solution - get wet. Is this approach morally justifiable? I don’t know, but I have had more than one job that involved standing out in the elements and I would dearly have loved the ability to charge my employer extra when it pissed rain.

Granted, there are certain types of socio-economic unfairness that only apply to people who are of very limited means. Wealthy individuals can afford to say, buy a house and pay the mortgage, as opposed to paying rent. On a smaller scale they could also afford things like health insurance, so if something does happen they will not be stuck with insane medical expenses. I freely admit that generally, it is easier for someone with large amounts of money not to spend that money if they don’t want to. Tragic injustice? Probably. It still doesn’t explain why poor people buy more fucking lottery tickets though. Because lets face it, thats just dumb.

Essentially though, this just makes it all the more irritating when someone with a good income writes letters to the Times about the exorbitant price of salted snacks, cinema tickets, or trips to the seaside.

In summary, if you have money, do whatever the hell you want with it. Save the whales, buy a dirtbike, see Star Wars 167 times in the cinema, I could not care less. Just remember that you fucking spent it, not the whales or the bike salesman or George Lucas (may he rot in the specially conceived hell for people who resurrect rejected scripts). So if you don’t like where it went, next time you get your paycheque have it inserted rectally so that you can have something legitimate to whine about.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.