Earlier quoted context omitted.
> promotes drinking "free coffee", whilst simultaneously portraying it as somehow morally superior to "coffee one has to pay for" to consume. The price does not enter into Sussman's argument. Maybe it could, given how students tend to be short on money and abhor paying for expensive textbooks, but it doesn't. > Growing and selling coffee takes time, labour and effort - yet none of that is being reflected or accounted…
> "In my coffee analogy, the promotion of the fair-trade alternative would be based on the fair-trade mechanism for ensuring the lower levels of the production chain receive a fairer share of the income. Whether or not the author pays less or more at the store is irrelevant to the argument." But for there to be any form of income trickling down production chains, someone has to be willing to pay something for the ser…
No, but it is also entirely orthogonal to the blog entry we're discussing. At no point does the monetary cost of something enter into what Sussman is talking about. You seem to be conflating free-as-in-beer with free-as-in-freedom (man, I feel nostalgic writing those phrases again – I don't mean this as an offense, but the difference seems to be so much more well understood among the tech savvy these days than it was 15 years ago).
This is where the coffee analogy becomes relevant. While indeed the cost of coffee affects a lot of things in the coffee value chain, the idea of fair trade (for all its flaws, let's not digress into those here) are not about the end product's cost.