Theology Today - Vol 41, No. 1 - April 1984 - ARTICLE

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MANY of us are concerned that we have too many possessions in a world where forty percent of the population is ill-fed and ill-clothed. What can we do to transfer some of our surplus goods to these poor people?

Some believe the most obvious starting place is simply to consume less. We call that "simple living." Let us look at simple living holistically to see what effect it might have on the poor.

If Americans cut down our consumption by (say) thirty percent, a glut would occur, and prices would fall. Surely that, would help the poor. But there would also be unemployment, for an economy geared to high production cannot adjust rapidly to lower.

On balance, I suspect, the poor in the Third World would suffer, because if we consume less, we will buy less from them. Much of the unemployment would be theirs. We always reduce our consumption in depression, and there is an old adage, "When the United States sneezes, the Third World has pneumonia."

This does not mean we should not decrease our possessions. I do think we have too many. But if we live simply, we do it for ourselves, not because it will help somebody else.

Let us try another tack. If simply reducing our possessions will not help the poor, why don't we give these possessions directly to those who need them? I believe this is a more positive step. Indeed, I know from the experience of the World Bank and foreign aid that giving can increase the well-being of the poor.

It is not easy, however. There have been many failures in foreign aid: funds have been misspent when used to line the pockets of rich politicians; aid has created dependency instead of self-reliance in the recipients. But let us suppose we can eliminate these failures. We know, for example, that Quaker projects, such as those of the American Friends Service Committee, have indeed reached the poor in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The success of such AFSC projects-it seems to me-comes from the fact that they do more than transfer resources. Always, they have some transcending social purpose. They have helped integrate urban slums

John P. Powelson is Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado. He has served as economic advisor in Bolivia, Mexico, and Kenya, and has lectured in universities in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. He has also been associated with the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-Amcrican Development Bank, and the American Friends Service Committee. A Quaker and a pacifist, he has been personally involved in social protests against racial injustice and nuclear armament. This essay, written expressly for the laity rather than experts, is taken from Holistic Economics and Social Protest, which is "Pendle Hill Pamphlet #252." Somewhat abbreviated, this excerpt is reprinted with permission from Pendle Hill Publications, Wallingford, Pa.

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whose inhabitants were tending to be antagonistic to each other; they have helped nomads adjust to a fixed residence when their population was too great to be supported by wandering; or they have spawned cooperatives to increase rural production.

What do all these experiences have in common? They have increased the productivity of the poor. Now (I believe) we begin to see how the limited resources of the world will be transferred from rich to poor (if such ever happens). It will be because the poor, with greater productive capability, bid those resources away from the rich.

When we view possessions holistically, we find that simply reducing our own will do nothing to increase those of the poor but may decrease them. Furthermore, a world in which one group always gives to another is not a dignified one. But our resources can be used effectively to improve the ways in which the poor will ultimately bid those same resources away from us.

To many of us, "competition" and "efficiency" are ugly concepts. Competition connotes doing someone else in, while advancing one's own ego, power, or wealth. Efficiency-its twin-is harsh, implying a ruthless exhaustion of labor, from which the last drop of sweat is squeezed.

In part-but only in part-the question is semantic. To see to what extent, let us examine the economic problems that competition and efficiency address. They are: How much can we produce with what we have? And, when the pie comes out of the oven, how is it to be cut?

Efficiency addresses the question of technology (how we produce our goods). It has a precise definition in economics which (in lay language) means "getting the most with the least." It does not imply most of what. Our "product" could be kindness to others and equality for women, just as it could be nuts, bolts, or tractors. The "least" might refer to the amount of labor or copper or petroleum in producing automobiles, but it could also be how to achieve human rights with minimum pain for those who oppose us. Efficiency implies no harshness whatsoever; indeed (as I believe) the most efficient way to produce is with love.

Let me therefore speak of loving efficiency. If the world does not have enough resources for everyone, those we do have must be husbanded lovingly. That is all that efficiency means to me.

Competition, on the other hand, addresses what goods we will produce, how many, who will produce them, and who will get the product. Now, much of our world is cutthroat and greedy in these matters. But the question is whether these qualities belong to human behavior (under our control) or whether they are imposed on us by a system (which we cannot control).

I see much good in competition. If the large automobile companies in the United States produce gas guzzlers at too high prices or if our steel costs too much because production is inefficient, then Japanese competition

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may hold our producers in line. Indeed, this competition helps curb inflation, thereby increasing the purchasing power of all of us, including our poor. I am incensed when our politicians, at the behest of large companies, try to limit this competition.

Liberal economists have extolled competition for helping determine quantities and prices. In a famous textbook for beginning economics students, Professor Paul Samuelson of M.I.T. notes that competition solves the problem of the many diversified goods that must be delivered to New York daily from all over the world.1 Very little milk sours because there is too much; yet, consumers rarely find the shelves empty because too little was delivered. Who (other than the competitive market) coordinated the thousands of decisions necessary to bring just the right amount of milk from the right amount of cows to the shelves of each supermarket individually?

I would go Professor Samuelson one point further. Despite the competitive framework within which farmers and milk distributors work, prices are not entirely free. In order to "protect" farmers, the government has decreed support prices. But whenever someone is protected from competition, someone else pays the cost. This time it is the consumer, and probably the poor one. The poor consumer spends a greater percentage of income on milk than does the rich, so his or her children get less milk at higher prices when the government decides that no farmer may, by competition, lower prices below the support level.

Yet there is much ill in competition as well, for all the negative qualities apply. My question, then, is: Are the ills of competition forced upon us by "the system"? Or, can we compete lovingly, just as we can be lovingly efficient? If we cannot, then bow will we determine how much milk will be delivered daily to New York and at what price? Without the Japanese to pressure them, how will we persuade our automobile and steel companies to produce high-quality goods at reasonable prices?

Competition is a fact of life. There are more applicants for Swarthmore College than there are places for them. The Admissions Office of Swarthmore has to allocate those places, with loving efficiency, in whatever way will do the most good for society, for the students who occupy them, and for those who are turned down and go elsewhere. We must learn to handle this situation. We must have practice in losing. If there were no competition, bow could we learn to lose?

Professor Paul Bohannon, of the University of Southern California, once reminded me that animals that win aggressive battles are healthier than those who persistently lose.2 But we should not therefore fight like animals. Professor Bohannon suggested that we need more positive-sum games, or games in which everyone is a winner. Competition can supply

1 Paul A. Samuelson, Economics, eleventh edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), p. 38.
2 He made this statement at a Symposium on Hope for the Future at Swarthmore College, April 23, 1983.

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such games. If workers are "competed" out of the wrong jobs and into the right ones; if students who would do better in College X are refused at Swarthmore; if high prices persuade us not to use too much energy because it is scarce and costly, then competition makes us healthy too. But if we compete hatefully, if we aggress personally, if we emphasize winning rather than constructive choices, then competition makes our society sick. But it is not competition that does these good or evil things. We are the ones.

I once heard a friend suggest that each taxpayer should have the right to declare the use to which his or her taxes would be put. Those who wanted their money to go for unemployment insurance and welfare would so stipulate; others would call for education; still others might invest their taxes in the military. He believed that the taxpayers, being more sensible than politicians, would devote more funds to constructive social endeavor and less to war. I doubted that he was right, but even that question was not the first to come to my mind.

Instead, I thought of who would call the shots. Those too poor to pay any taxes at all would lose their votes on the budget. The others would determine the government expenditures according to their incomes. Rich people paying higher taxes would have more votes than poor people paying lower taxes.

But this example is not unique. Every time economic power is legitimized as a weapon, a more powerful weapon goes to the rich than to the poor. If we divest in South Africa, then the rich-who have the resources to invest in the first place-have the say. If we boycott South Africa's exports, then those able to buy gold and diamonds decide what is right and what is wrong. Their decisions may be good ones in this case, but I fear for the principle as a way of life.

Let me make one distinction clear. I am not talking about workers going on strike, nor about Martin Luther King calling upon blacks to boycott the buses of Alabama. In each case, these are sufferers from specific evil, using whatever resources they can to pressure the perpetrators of evil. May God be with them!

But I am talking about people rich enough to invest or buy diamonds and gold, legitimizing the use of economic power to bring about political solutions on behalf of other people, however laudable those solutions may be.

Many religions have a long tradition of refusing to participate in evil. Quakers speak of wearing our swords as long as we can, but when we can do so no more, we take them off. Still, I see a difference between ourselves not participating in evil and ourselves using economic power to prevent others from perpetrating evil.

One case before us is that of Nestle. The Nestle Company advertises baby formula to mothers in the Third World, and we do not believe they

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should. If we were mothers in the Third World wishing to protest, we would refuse to buy. But most of us are not such mothers. So some of us protest by refusing to buy any of Nestle's products.

Now, some of Nestle's products are not harmful. There is nothing wrong with cocoa, and if coffee damages the health, that is not why we boycott Nestle's. So in this case, we are not just refraining from evil. We are boycotting activities that are not themselves evil in order to pressure a company not to behave in an evil way.

Why should the morality of this disturb me? Certainly not out of affection for Nestle's stockholders and management. But as I view the economy holistically, I sense that the effect of a boycott will burst out in unexpected spots. What about the cocoa farmer in Ghana who may have depended on selling his crop to Nestle? Will he be able to sell to another company? Or, could he support his family on a different crop?

I presume that other cocoa companies, Hershey's for example, do not keep surplus chocolate-making equipment to take up the slack in case Nestle's is boycotted. Therefore, other companies would probably not buy the Ghanaian farmer's crop. Also, cocoa is a specialized product, and it is not clear to me that the farmer can produce something else of equivalent value on the same land.

Possibly reformers believe it is all right to harm some in order to avoid greater harm to others. Maybe the Ghanaian farmer should be sacrificed, his children left to die of starvation, if a larger number of babies can be saved by being breastfed. I cannot make my moral arithmetic work that way. But even if it did, we must then ask if the greater good will indeed occur. Will a boycott stop the sale of baby formula in the Third World? I do not think it would do that at all.

Quite possibly a successful boycott will have an impact on Nestle. But a holistic approach leads us to ask, "What is everything that would happen if...?" If Nestle's stopped selling formula in third-world countries, surely someone else would take its place. Surely there are national companies in Africa (and elsewhere) that know how to produce and advertise formula.

Perhaps we wish to punish Nestle, or show the world what happens to multinational corporations that commit evil. If so, there is some reason for the boycott. But if we wish to diminish baby formula in the Third World, it seems to me the approach lies elsewhere. It lies in education and sanitation (especially cleaning up water supplies). Some would say: "Let's do both: boycott and educate." But we cannot do our utmost in both at once, for funds spent on one cannot be spent on the other. I presume the boycott is not cheap, with the cost of postage and of monitoring Nestle's actions throughout the world. What would be the impact if all those funds were spent instead on education and sanitation?

Let us address the case of South Africa similarly. The object (I believe) is to end Apartheid. It is not to punish the South African whites,

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nor is it simply to refrain from participating in Apartheid ourselves (though it may be that in part).

I believe, first, that Apartheid will be ended (if it is ended at all) by South Africans, not by us, and second, that it is more likely to be ended in a prosperous than in a broken economy. South African blacks are more powerful than they have ever been, more able to challenge their masters than ever before. The job-reservation laws (setting aside certain jobs for whites and others for blacks) are less and less effective because prosperity has created more jobs "reserved for whites" than there are whites to fill them. Black unions have been recognized for the first time in history as legitimate bargaining agencies. I am not starry-eyed over the prospects of blacks, and I recognize the overwhelming power and oppression by the whites. But if ever blacks are to have the effective leverage of strong unions, this will arise out of a strong economy, not a weak one.

It is very serious to destroy an economy. Depression afflicts the poor far more than the rich, for the rich (in South Africa, the whites) have better ways to defend themselves, or else they have reserves to tide them over. The poor (in South Africa, the blacks) do not, and their capacity to confront their masters may be seriously damaged.

If we are to harm South Africa's health by boycotting or withdrawing our investments, we should first analyze the impact holistically. Where will the suffering surface? What will be the effect on the liberation movements within? The fact that some (not all) of these movements approve the boycott does not solve our problem, for they may not have examined the economy holistically either.

Some have told me that a boycott in South Africa will not hurt because it will not go far enough to destroy the mines and all the jobs for the blacks. It will jolt the economy a little to let the South African government know we are serious. But I do not accept this. We should always live as if others might follow our example. And if all others followed us in boycotting South Africa thoroughly, thousands upon thousands of blacks would be forced into intense misery, even death. The ultimate question is whether we seek positive ways to approach evil, however difficult they may be to find, or whether we approach evil by threatening to destroy the lives and livelihood of others.

III

Third-world countries have declared before the United Nations that their terms of trade are persistently deteriorating vis-�-vis the industrial world. By "terms of trade," they mean prices of exports relative to prices of imports. They have asked for a New International Economic Order (hereafter, NIEO), which would (among other things) protect their prices. Should we support it?

Suppose, with inflation, the prices of Tanzania's exports to the United States should rise by less than the prices of U.S. exports to Tanzania.

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Over time, Tanzania would pay more tea and more sisal for the tractors it buys from us. If this occurred, we would say that the terms of trade were depreciating for Tanzania and appreciating for the United States.

The NIEO consists of a long list of ways in which third-world diplomats want to improve their bargaining power vis-�-vis the industrialized world. At the top of the list is controlling the terms of trade. Primary products (those of the soil, like crops and minerals) are the principal exports of most third-world countries. Their diplomats present statistics showing that the prices of these exports have not risen, with inflation, proportionately to those of the industrial products that they import.

They have also beheld the success of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and how even the oil glut does not deter that group. They want similar organizations for copper, tin, coffee, and bananas, to name only a few. Clearly, these organizations would have a better chance to succeed if the industrialized countries bought only from them, after agreeing on the higher prices.

The NIEO has a strong appeal to protesters. We want to help the poor in a dignified way. Some of us believe that the deteriorating terms of trade are the result of monopolies which have (we are told) the power to set the prices at which they buy primary products and the prices at which they sell manufactured goods. Would it not be well to offset this power by OPEC-type arrangements for third-world exports in addition to oil?

We can't answer this question without knowing whether or not the terms of trade indeed have been moving against primary-product exporters. The answer is no, they have not. If one compares all primary-product prices with all prices of manufacturers for all periods for which price statistics are available, one must conclude that there is no general tendency for either class of prices persistently to rise or fall relative to the other.3

How, then, can top-ranking diplomats stand before sophisticated United Nations audiences and say that the terms of trade deteriorate for primary producers? How can these "deteriorations" be touted in United Nations publications (as indeed they are)?

The answer is that every such case is one of selective perception. The terms of trade for primary products were deteriorating from 1950 to 1965, but they were improving from 1939 to 1950 and again from 1965 to 1975. So, if you tell your audience only about 1950 to 1965, forgetting about the ten years before and after, you can "prove" the deterioration. Alternatively, you can tell about some products (sisal?) and forget others (coffee?). But it is bard to do that for any single product (even sisal and coffee) unless the years are also selectively perceived.

3 I have performed this calculation for Latin America in another book. See William Loehr and John P. Powelson, Threat to Development: Pitfalls of the NIEO (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1983), p. 19.

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Now, it is quite legitimate to ask: So what? Suppose the terms of trade have not been deteriorating for the Third World. Should we not help them anyway by paying higher prices for their exports?

Perhaps. But before we do so, let us examine the matter holistically. Instead of dividing the world into rich and poor countries, let us divide it into rich and poor people. Then we must examine who are the producers of primary products: rich people or poor? Who own the coffee plantations, the copper mines, and the banana plants? If exporting companies are owned by third-world governments, how do these governments dispose of the profits? On rural development, or on high salaries to friends of the regime?

Next we must ask whether the quantity of primary products demanded would hold up with higher prices. Will people drink as many cups of coffee for sixty cents each as they would for thirty cents? If not, coffee-producing countries may gain because of higher prices but lose because less coffee is sold. These gains and losses may not be distributed evenly. For example, the rich plantation owners might gain while the small farmer might be the one forced to curtail his output. Furthermore, higher prices are paid by the poor as well as by the rich. Third-world slumdwellers who want to put copper pipes in their huts would feel the pinch.

All the above is illustrated by what happened when oil prices increased. The proceeds went largely to people already wealthy. Many third-world countries went heavily into debt, and oil-based fertilizers became too expensive for their small farmers. Food became more costly for all. Arab governments said they were giving some of the proceeds to third-world countries, but in fact the recipients were mostly members of the Arab League, and the aid was only a tiny fractionof the amounts extracted in higher prices. Finally, oil-rich governments misspent their funds on armaments, airports, fine office buildings, bullet-proof Mercedes cars for their executives, and on farmland and condominiums in the United States. Very little went to improving rural areas or creating employment for the poor.

All this experience should not make us sanguine about supporting demands for a New International Economic Order. When we look at the question holistically, we see much more than primary products being exported by poor countries. We see that these products are sold by rich people; that they are consumed by poor people; and an increase in their prices would transfer real incomes from the poor to the rich, not the other way around.

Much protest is directed against multinational corporations (MNCs). I sense that protesters feel MNCs are very powerful, something like governments unto themselves, and that their quest for profits is at the expense of poor people throughout the world.

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I wonder, however, if protesters hate the evils or hate the companies. Are we fighting substance or are we attacking forms? Would we be just as concerned about baby formula in third-world countries if it were produced by small companies, different ones in each country, instead of by Nestle, an MNC (not American even, but Swiss)?

I have a hard time being persuaded of the great power of MNCs. In most third-world countries, MNCs pay up to 100% higher wages than local companies (a fact testified by the International Labor Organization),4 and they provide hospitals, housing, and schools far more than do local companies. A job with an MNC is a plum. MNCs pay high taxes (about 70% of profits of mining and petroleum companies, somewhat less for others); often their foreign exchange purchases and prices are controlled by third-world governments. All this is so not by choice of the MNCs, but because third-world governments have imposed these restrictions upon them-an event which indicates the relative power of companies and government.

Some say that MNCs are powerful because they can pick up and move from country to country, always going where they can get the best "deal." Surely they do some of this, but they do not easily carry their mines and buildings with them. No, once invested, MNCs usually stay put for a while.

Some protesters say that even if MNCs do pay twice the wage rate of local companies, they ought to pay even more, After all, they pay still more in their home countries. Let us examine that question holistically. What would happen to the total economy, and to workers not employed by MNCs?

I believe MNCs should not pay even the high wages they do pay. In most of the Third World, urban industries-not just MNCs-pay wages far above the average level in the countryside. This phenomenon, known as dualism, has two effects. First, it causes industry to use machinery rather than labor wherever it can; this is the way to become "modern," the government elites think. We have already seen that too high wages go along with unemployment, and unemployment is one of the greatest problems of the Third World. Second, it creates a labor elite: a small group of workers, holding a few jobs in modern industry, who must think of ways to protect their privileges against the mass of outside workers whose productivity is not high enough for high wages. When socialist Salvador Allende became President of Chile in 1971, he tried to reduce the high wages in the copper companies, formerly MNCs and now nationalized. He had a strike on his hands.

But, protesters ask, if MNCs pay less wages in the Third World than they do at home, are they not making enormous profits? But do we know what profits they are earning? In response to a Gallup opinion poll, students in the United States were shown to have a greatly exaggerate

4 International Labor Organization, Wages and Working Conditions in Multinational Enterprises (Geneva, 1976), pp. 49-50.

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idea of what corporation profits are,5 a fact which led two Princeton professors of economics (Baumol and Binder) to comment that "at the same time that a strong antibusiness mood prevails on campus, there is also widespread ignorance of the costs and rewards of doing business."6

In fact, profits vary widely according to type of enterprise. In the 1970s, as one might suppose, U.S. petroleum companies had high earnings, in one year returning more than 100% of their investment abroad. But profits of U.S. manufacturing MNCs at the same time were varying from 8% to 15% on capital invested in the Third World.7 The petroleum companies are almost all nationalized now, with profits going to the Third World governments, and the trend of MNCs is away from all kinds of mineral investment and toward investment in manufacturing for the local market. As a consequence, MNC profits will surely decline toward the lower percentage.

How can profits be so little in manufacturing, if the firms use cheap labor? One reason is that other costs are higher. If labor is cheaper in the Third World, capital is more expensive. Another reason is that prices received for their products are often kept down by taxes and controls. In final analysis, whether profits are too great or not is in the mind of the observer; it is, however, important that the observer know what they are before launching a protest.

What makes protesters believe the profits of MNCs are so high? I suspect it is our old friend selective perception, whose impact we saw in the terms of trade. Out of the flood of books on MNCs, two stand out as comprehensive treatments: Global Reach, by Barnett and M�ller 8 and Sovereignty at Bay, by Vernon. 9 As their titles indicate, both portray the MNC as powerful. But there is a great difference: Global Reach is full of unverifiable anecdotes selectively perceived, whereas Sovereignty at Bay observes all the rules of research which economists are taught in graduate school to protect themselves against their own biases. For example, one of the many anecdotes in Global Reach attributes the following statement to an unnamed vice-president of a U.S. bank: "...while we earn around 13 to 14 percent on our U.S. operations, we can easily count on a 33 percent rate of return on our business conducted in Latin America."10 First, the statement is hearsay, with no indication that the authors verified it. Second, it is not representative. Drawing

5 The Gallup Opinion Index, Report number 123 (Princeton, N.J.: September, 1975).
6 William J. Baumol and Alan S. Binder, Economics: Principles and Policy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 548.
7 Calculated from Obie G. Whichard, "U.S. Direct Investment in 1979," Survey of Current Business, Volume 60, Number 8 (U.S. Department of Commerce: August, 1980). Detailed tables for the years 1966-1979 appear in Loehr and Powelson, op cit., pp. 88-93.
8 Richard J. Barnett and Ronald E. Muller, Global Reach (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1974).
9 Raymond Vernon, Sovereignty at Bay: The Multinational Spread of U.S. Enterprises (New York: Basic Books, 1971).
10 Barnett and M�ller, op cit., p. 154.

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generalizations from anecdotes is the most deadly way to confirm our previous opinions instead of investigating them. But another form of selective perception is to read only the books that say what we want to hear. Many of my anti-MNC friends-this is an anecdote, not to be generalized upon-have read Global Reach, but I have a hard time finding one who knows about Sovereignty at Bay.

But I am not a blanket defender of MNCs, for they commit many offenses that I find repulsive. Their officers sometimes bribe Third World government officials to grant special favors, to set special prices, to pass special laws, and (who knows?) to make special tax concessions. To my mind, the worst crime committed by MNCs is where they may have connived with national governments to deprive indigenous tribes--people of their lands in order to produce an export crop.

Coca-Cola is a frequent target of protesters. With Coke as the example, MNCs are criticized for spreading our decadent culture to the Third World. This beverage contains caffeine; it has no significant nutritive value; and its sugar content harms teeth. Is it not immoral for the Coca-Cola company to introduce such a product to already under-nourished people in the Third World?

I certainly agree that it is immoral. For the same reason, it is immoral to sell coffee in the Third World, which-when taken with sugar-possesses the same nutritional defects as Coca-Cola. So also is it immoral to sell wine, and-if I were to go on-a large, number of products whose consumption is conspicuously enjoyed in our own country.

But my concept of immorality is overridden by my question of who is the judge. Third World citizens are quite capable of resisting culture they do not want. They are no more naive in their choices of beverage than are the protesters themselves, whom I have sometimes seen drinking Coke. In most countries, by the way, Coca-Cola is produced by locally-owned companies and not by an MNC at all. These companies buy the concentrate from the American company, just the way any locally-owned company may buy some of its inputs from abroad. (In a few countries, on the other hand, Coca-Cola does own its own bottling plants.)

To sum up: MNCs have been overrated in their power, in their profits, and in their evils. Still, they commit evils, and these must be addressed. But it is a fundamental principle of justice that a criminal should not be disparaged as a person. He should only be held responsible for infringing specific laws. So also the MNC should not be disparaged as a generic form but only as specific MNCs have committed specific wrongs. Nor should some criminals be selected for punishment while others go free. The evils will not be addressed so long as protesters diffuse their attacks into broadsides against MNCs while other companies freely engage in the same wrongs. Just as there is much good in any criminal, so also is there good in MNCs. And, evil is evil no matter who commits it....

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Even when one has examined a potential protest holistically, the moral issues remain. Many strongly religious people decided, during World War II, that killing Germans was moral because it prevented Germans from killing Jews. Likewise, we might today sacrifice the cocoa farmer in Ghana if we are convinced that this act will diminish the propaganda for baby formula. I do not want to try these moral issues here. I only want the boycotter to be reminded about the Ghanaian farmer, so that the decision to sacrifice him is made with full knowledge.

Do we stand as examples? What will happen if others copy our behavior? Many protesters against war refuse to pay (say) 45% of their taxes on the ground that this is the percentage of government revenue paying for future or past wars. What would happen if everyone in the country did the same? My guess is that the first sufferers would be poor, and the last would be the military. Indeed, this is usually the attitude of the U.S. government. If there are not enough funds for everything, the poor, not the military, are deprived. But if only a few refuse to pay taxes, they may not only respect their own consciences but have an effective voice. There is indeed a moral dilemma.

This same question has come to me as a conscientious objector. "What would happen if everyone behaved as you do?" I believe the effects would be less destructive than the alternative (war), and that is why I took that stand in World War II. But I do not think the same is so for boycotting South Africa or Nestle's.

In choosing how they will protest an injustice, social reformers need to consider questions which I fear are sometimes ignored. All the cases in this article have one point in common. There is no solution that does not leave a moral dilemma. This happens frequently in economics. Most of the time, we cannot say yes, that decision was the right one, unequivocally.

This should not prevent us from making moral decisions. But it does require that we think economics holistically. As we turn from negative protest to positive action, we must consider the full impact of our decisions. Part of that impact may pop out in the most unexpected spot and be quite the opposite of what we had intended.