A World Where Everything Has A Price Tag

[TexasTowelie]

By Carol Morgan

Everything has a price tag. For the wealthy, there’s nothing that can’t be purchased for the right price and unfortunately, many financially-strapped Americans are sufficiently desperate to comply with the law of supply and demand.

If you have enough money, you can buy a school on a college campus that bears your name.

If you donate enough money to certain politicians in Texas, you can become a regent for a university or sit on an important policy-making board.

Have $500,000? You can immigrate to America and buy permanent residency.

If you’re a lobbyist, you can hire someone to stand in line for you so you can attend a congressional hearing.

If you’re a corporation and don’t mind paying high-priced fines, you can pollute the Gulf with oil and foul the air in Texas.

Because of income inequality, people struggling for financial survival are willing to swallow their dignity and their physical well-being to meet the demands of those willing to pay. There are hundreds of opportunities if you don’t mind putting yourself at risk.

You can sell your plasma. Young women sell their bodies for pleasure, their eggs to a donor bank and bear children for others. The Business Insider even touted the 9 body parts that you don’t need in order to earn money. Sell-a-kidney, rent-a-womb, be a corporate mercenary in a foreign country or sell advertising space on your body in the form of corporate tattoos.

We sell babies, traffic human beings for sex and labor, and purchase murderers to kill the world leaders with whom we don’t agree. If we don’t have gainful employment, we create new revenue streams to survive, despite its legality or morality. People are that desperate for money. In one survey, 1 in 14 Americans said they would murder someone for 3 million dollars.

Whether you’re desperate or merely greedy, there are certain things that must remain priceless.

“We need to ask whether there are some things money should not buy”, says Michael J. Sandel, author of What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. This is an excellent read that spotlights the world’s evolution into an unethical and unprincipled mass with the love of money on one side and the lack of it on the other.

In a world where wages and salaries are flat and corporations’ profits are at an all-time high, I don’t see it improving, only worsening.

I recall about 150 years ago, we commoditized human beings. Sellers placed them atop platforms and buyers inspected teeth, muscle, bone and reproductive-quality to obtain the best product for their dollar. Somewhat like today, except there is no color line. The poor and marginalized have become the slaves of the new global market.

Financial desperation is the new racism that divides the world, just like cell mitosis, except it is far less equal. The poor have become a new global caste system, just like the Dalits in India who dispose of human waste and serve as caretakers for the funeral ghats.

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Carol Morgan is a career counselor, writer, speaker, former Democratic candidate for the Texas House and the award-winning author of Of Tapestry, Time and Tears, a historical fiction about the 1947 Partition of India. Email her at [e-mail] or follow on Twitter @CounselorCarol1, on Facebook as CarolMorgan1 and her writer’s blog at www.carolmorgan.org

http://lubbockonline.com/interact/blog-post/carol-morgan/2013-11-05/world-where-everything-has-price-tag

Cross-posted in Good Reads forum.