I have always said that some of the best things I learned in school were from substitute teachers. Subs are usually older teachers who have retired and are looking to stay busy and make a few bucks or young teachers-to-be looking to turn a temporary gig into a job. Both are in a position they know they probably won’t be in tomorrow so they tend to be lax on enforcing all the rules and sticking to the lesson plan provided as long as the students aren’t going to get them in trouble. Because of this, the inquisitive nature of children, and their timeless ability to manipulate subs into getting off topic, I have spent many a class listening to a sub wax poetic about a wide range of topics. Usually they would tell us where they had come from, previous jobs, and where they have traveled to. This would always lead to a tangent of live lessons and other information that would turn out to be far more applicable in the real world than the math or English assignments we were ignoring. Next to the older gentleman who talked about his time in Vietnam and coming to peace with it, the story that has stuck with me the most is the one about brake pads.
I am fuzzy on what grade we were in but I would assume it had to have been towards the second half of high school since the subject was cars and which brand was superior. The discussion of which cars lasted longer caused one of us to say “why can’t they just make a car that’s designed to last longer than 10 or 12 years?” The sub replied “because that would put them out of business.” This older gentleman would go on to explain the basis of not only the car industry but the basis of the entire capitalistic economy we live in and follow along in without questioning.
“Think about something as simple as brake pads. They could easily make a cheap brake pad that lasts forever or at the very least, the entire time you own the car. But that would be suicide for the brake pad company and it would have an impact on hundreds of other jobs.” Even though I still think to this day I had a slightly better understanding of the workings of the world than my contemporaries at the time, this was puzzling to me. The idea of long lasting brake pads having any other affect than having one less thing to worry about while driving was beyond my comprehension. Once it was explained to me though, the concept quickly spread like wild fire through my thought process.
“Brake pads need to break down. If they don’t, you never need to buy new ones. This means there is no need for competition from other brake pad companies so you put them out of business. Because the only brake pads you need to make are for new cars, you only have to make a few thousand a year instead of the couple of million you usually produce. This means you need fewer workers. Because you only make a few thousand now, you order less material. This means less work for the people who mine the material, less work for the people who drive the truck to ship the material, less work for the people who make the machines that make the brake pads, less work for the people who make the boxes to ship the brake pads in, and less work for the mechanics who install the brake pads. You just took away hundreds, maybe thousands of jobs that depend on brake pads breaking down every couple of thousand miles.”
We live in a disposable society. I don’t just mean plastic forks, paper plates, and those crappy Bic razors you buy in 12 packs. Our way of life depends on everything being replaced every so often. The entire concept of fashion is based on replacing what they told you was in style last month with what they tell you is in fashion this month. They don’t want you buying rugged jeans and 100% cotton shirts that will last 5 years. They want you buying silk and mix blend clothing that will only last a couple of months. We buy incomplete and flawed products and then complain about what they lack until a new version is created with a whole new set of flaws. There have been 3 iPhones released in 3 years and no one seems to question why they didn’t wait for new technology to be developed instead of putting out a duplicate device in a different shell. We line up for new video game systems every 10 years and get nickel and dimed on every extra controller and add on they can come up with. No stops to think about why we are replacing working items with new items or buying items we know won’t last. We yell about people not buying American made products that last just as long as the cheap imports that cost half the price. We are willing to spend everything we earn producing these disposable products for disposable products we can call our own for a short period of time.
It seems capitalism is like a carrot in front of a mule that started walking hundreds of years ago. If we become satisfied with what we have, if we catch our desires, we stop moving forward and the movement of money from person to person slows to a halt. It’s when I got to this concept that I finally realized that money isn’t real. It doesn’t exist. It’s a concept. An agreed upon idea that we have given power to. We give arbitrary values to objects and processes. We represent these thoughts with paper and metal and numbers on screens. $1 is just a conditional concept. What we define it as today is obsolete tomorrow. We have heard plenty of people talk about the good old days when a nickel could pay for a trip to the movies. If you were to dig up that piece of metal from wherever it ended up, it no longer has the power it once held. It hasn’t changed in size, weight, or name but it no longer represents what it did back then. Even the movie holds no real value. The price of the movie is based on the cost to run the equipment, pay the employees, and buy the copy of the film you are viewing. And those prices are based on a handful of other things and so on and so on. If one person in that chain decided their product or time is worth more or less on any given day, it has a ripple effect up and down the line. A $1 increase in oil can cause a $20 increase in food prices if someone decides so. And when you ask that person why, they will put them blame on someone else in the chain for changing their prices and so on and so on.
I used to collect baseball cards as a kid. Got a bunch from my uncle and used to spend money on buying new packs every week. Like anyone who collects cards, I was looking for a rare card that would be worth money someday (hopefully sooner, rather than later). How I determined what each card was worth was by looking it up in a magazine called Beckett or a Beckett book as I called it. It was produced monthly and had a price value listing of just about every card made over the previous 5 years and then the value of certain cards for every year before that going back 20 or 30 years. What these prices represented was “market value” or what someone in a trading card store or collector would pay for it. Now the part that was crazy to me wasn’t the value of old cards of famous player in mint condition, it was the value of not so rare cards. You would see listings for cards worth pennies due to their mass production. This meant that according to Becketts, if you could round up a couple of thousand backup second basemen cards from 1991, you could trade them for $50 or $60. Of course, that is not the case. Those cards truly hold no monetary value. Really, no card does. Like everything else in the world, value is subjective to the person who is willing to pay for it. Price is set by the people who do math in their head like “how many hours of working my job is this worth?” or “will owning this be worth trading the equivalent of what $xx.xx could be used to buy?” There is no set equation that says working 2 hours at CVS is worth dinner at Applebee’s. Both sides of the equation are subjective. They have no finite value, rather they have been given a value by the people who assigned the value of the good and services they each are created from and so on and so on.
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