Zen-ish Thoughts About the Price of Eggs in America

All historically significant events are a result of multiple contributing causes, but the particular role played by economic motivations is hard to overstate. The details change with the century and circumstance – we will illustrate with tea, cotton, and eggs – but the structure is the same: A healthy and reasonable desire for economic well-being readily mutates into economic gluttony that tramples other healthy and reasonable human interests, and lofty principles are unconsciously or cynically used to disguise it. Examining the role we allow economics to occupy is the necessary first step toward putting it in balance with our non-economic needs.

The Cost of Tea In 19^th Century China

There was no tea in Britain until trade with China began in the 1600s. Taking tea gradually became a national institution, ritualized in late morning tea, afternoon tea, and high tea, every day, by people in every class. To underscore the prominence of tea in Britain's collective mind, note that morning and afternoon "teas" were not just a cup of tea, but scheduled and formal between-meal snack breaks that included a variety of food items, and for the working class majority of the country, "high tea" was actually dinner, yet they are all called "teas". In the early 1800s, China was still Britain's only source for the tea they had made an integral part of their daily life and identity. So what was the price of tea in China?

Silver. Britain tried several other forms of payment, including early products of the Industrial Revolution of which they were immensely proud, but China would only accept payment in silver. The British passion for tea was so consuming that in the early 1800s Britain began to run out of silver, which meant they would become unable to feed their psychological dependence on tea.

This was treated as an existential threat to the British way of life. It is always the case in culture wars and literal wars that the elite tell the masses they must take action or their entire way of life will be destroyed by horrible, uncivilized, inferior "others". That way, whatever we do is in self-defense, and in self-defense no normally unacceptable action is off-limits, especially when used against unreasonable, morally unreachable, inferior beings.

Here is the "clever" plan that Britain adopted. Grow opium in India (already under British occupation). Smuggle it into China on British merchant ships. Get a lot of Chinese people addicted to it. Only take payment in silver.

It does the job very effectively if you are okay with destroying people's lives and damaging an entire society. Since the lives and society weren't British, Britain was okay with it. It was not philosophically much different than colonialism – conquer "savages", destroy their culture, and extract economic value.

China already had domestic opium production, but it was expensive, in short supply, largely contained to medicinal usage, and ingested rather than smoked. Once Britain made opium cheap and abundant and taught people to smoke it (a much more addictive pathway), over ten million Chinese people became addicts.

This ruined their lives, and their families' lives. With the effect concentrated in major cities on major trade routes, it also devastated labor in these places, and therefore the Chinese economy. With millions addicted and the government no longer able to provide economic stability, this weakened Chinese society as a whole.

Since Britain was now paying for tea with silver it perpetually re-extracted from Chinese drug addicts, the tea literally cost them nothing. Even the costs of growing and shipping the opium were paid for with ever-recycling Chinese silver. The tea was economically free. The moral cost was freely ignored.

China had its own version of the Boston Tea Party, dumping a huge quantity of opium from ships into the harbor. Britain declared war in defense of British property (illegal drugs), the safety of their sailors and merchants (drug traffickers), and the glorious and unquestionable right to "free trade."

History records Member of Parliament William Gladstone as providing vigorous opposition to Britain's actions. He called the war "unjust and iniquitous". But when good values conflict with commercial interests, good values tend to lose. Gladstone's position did not prevail.

At the war's conclusion, China was forced to cede Hong Kong to Britain, open additional ports to Britain, legalize the opium trade, and pay Britain 21 million Spanish silver dollars – several years' worth of the Chinese government's total revenue to compensate Britain for the opium tossed in the harbor, and the cost of the war that Britain started. As these "reparations" had to be made in silver, Britain could use even more of China's own silver to "buy" even more tea for free. This worked so well for Britain that about a dozen years later they started the Second Opium War.

Sold to British citizens as a war to defend British property, people, and the so-called unassailable principle of free trade, the Opium Wars are perhaps history's most naked example of commercial interest capturing state power, disguising itself as some alleged principle, and serving economic interests without restraint.

Is this snapshot unfair to Britain, and too convenient for the point I want to make? In Britain's defense, wasn't Britain the first major imperial power to ban slavery, and weren't they aggressively attacking the slave trades of Spain and France at great personal cost during the same period?

Britain was actively subjugating people in Africa and elsewhere, still quite proudly building the empire on which the sun never set. Humanitarianism as a pure motive strains credibility when the alleged humanitarian is liberating these Africans over here while simultaneously exploiting and killing those other Africans over there. And let's not imagine that Britain was suddenly a great place to be Black.

What more plausible motive might be in play? Spain, France, and Portugal were Britain's chief imperial rivals. Disrupting their slavery-dependent economies by destroying their slave supply lines was a gigantic win for Britain. Without starting a war by directly attacking the countries themselves or their navies, under cover of the "principle" of freedom, Britain could materially weaken all of its major rivals.

In the race to conquer as much of the non-European world as possible, in the endless pursuit of relative power within Europe itself, this was a great tactic. That motive – which is a pure speculation on my part – is more consistent with the total picture than an incongruous burst of humanitarianism in the midst of colonial expansion.

Buddhism identifies craving – and specifically the craving for acquisition, for having and holding what we fear to lose – as a root of suffering. Not because desire is evil, but because what we acquire is impermanent, and impermanence will always have the last word. Britain's tea obsession, and the willingness to destroy millions of lives rather than relinquish it, illustrates this dynamic on an international scale. The craving was real. The suffering it produced, in China and eventually in Britain's own moral standing, was also real.

Abolishing Slavery

There is nothing especially British about ignoring people's humanity for the sake of something far less important, and dressing it up as fighting for a great cause. Consider the country founded on the proposition that all men are created equal.

The United States Constitution, that landmark embodiment of Enlightenment political philosophy, contains the infamous "three-fifths compromise" (not to mention that by omission it leaves women in the condition of being perpetual children, entirely dependent on men). Enslaved people – who could not vote, could not own property, could not decide who to marry or even to stay together as a family, had no freedom of movement, could not choose the labor they would perform, could be beaten to death on a whim – who could not legally exist as persons – were counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of calculating Congressional representation.

This did not mean that they had three-fifths of the rights of a White person, as pathetic as that would have been. They had literally zero rights – the same rights as a pair of boots, to be used until discarded. But this construction, coupled with the Electoral College, ensured that Southern states would have more representation in Congress than their number of citizens deserved, so Northern states could not force them to end slavery, or otherwise impose laws that failed to account for regional differences between Northern and Southern economies. There it is – economics once again in the driver's seat.

The post-hoc claim that the real reason for the Civil War was State's Rights is just another example of disguising an economic motive as an uncontroversial principle. Multiple Confederate documents, including the Confederate Constitution itself, explicitly state that their primary reason for secession was to preserve slavery and to extend it to as much territory as possible.

The abolitionists had been making a compelling moral case against slavery for decades, and losing. William Lloyd Garrison began publishing The Liberator in 1831. The argument did not lack force or clarity. What changed was not the moral case but the economic one. Northern industrialists did not want a rival nation on their southern border competing for European trade. Wage labor in an industrializing economy – workers you paid and then discarded – cost less than slavery once you factored in housing, feeding, and the infrastructure of brutality required to sustain it. The moral case against slavery had been well-presented for thirty years. Abolition became a national cause only when economic interests pointed in the same direction.

The formerly enslaved were promised forty acres and a mule, to be taken from Confederate estates – a material foundation for freedom in an economic world. The promise was rescinded within a year. President Andrew Johnson returned the land to its former Confederate owners. Former slaves received nothing at all.

What followed was an open attempt to reconstitute slavery as much as possible. Jim Crow laws passed across the South with remarkable speed, recreating many features of the former separation and subjugation in a new form.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime. That exception was not an accident. Black men were arrested on trivial pretexts and leased to plantations as unpaid laborers, subjected to unchecked abuse, and continued not to have even the most basic human rights. Strict segregation, and the systematic exclusion from voting through poll taxes, literacy tests, and open violence kept the White man's boot on the Black man's neck.

Remarkably, African Americans made progress over the following decades, despite the worst motives and best efforts of the society in which they lived. But when that society began to really prosper in the 1940s, yet another regulation was imposed on the allegedly free market: redlining. Neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1940s are still identifiable on today's maps of poverty, health outcomes, and life expectancy. You cannot build generational wealth in a neighborhood the government has decided not to invest in. A hundred years after the Civil War, the problems were still so severe that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were necessary.

These pieces of progressive legislation materially changed the legal structure for the better, but the real world situation merely mutated to maintain the status quo. Staying with redlining as an example, along with other practices, redlining ensured that the postwar wealth-building mechanism available to White Americans was explicitly withheld from Black Americans. Black neighborhoods remained starved of high-quality housing, municipal services, and school funding in a self-fulfilling cycle of oppression and blaming the victim that persists to this day.

The broader regulatory structure in place in America today still has Black Americans stopped and searched at multiples of their population percentage, more likely to be charged, more likely to be convicted, and more likely to receive longer sentences for equivalent offenses committed by White people. In essence, to be of African descent in America today continues to mean existing as three-fifths of a human being.

The Buddhist instruction to see things exactly as they are is not a counsel of accepting things as they are. It is the precondition for compassion. You cannot feel the weight of what happened and continues to happen to African Americans if you are committed to a story in which the trouble ended at Appomattox. Many people look at the African American community and wonder accusingly why they haven't gotten over something that happened over 150 years ago. But it didn't end with the war. As briefly outlined here, it merely changed shape, and it persists today. The road from seeing this honestly to feeling something about it is very short. Many people find it too uncomfortable to take.

The Price of Eggs In 21^st Century America

The phrase, "What's that got to do with the cost of tea in China?" is a variant of the older expression, "What's that got to do with the price of eggs?" We've seen the impact of the cost of tea in China. Let's look at the price of eggs in America. The mechanisms change. The pattern doesn't.

In 2024, millions of Americans voted for a presidential candidate despite his felony convictions, his civil fraud judgment, his two impeachments, his publicly documented cruelties, his open contempt for democratic institutions, his known history of not paying contractors and workers, his prior term's poor economic record, and the fact that he was endorsed by essentially nobody in the professional economics community. They voted, many of them said, over the price of eggs. Trump, they said against all evidence to the contrary, would be good for the economy, and that mattered more than sexual assault, gross incompetence, insurrection, and all the rest.

That's as naked as it gets. The documented record – felony convictions, civil fraud judgment, two impeachments, a first term that produced no healthcare plan and no meaningful economic relief for working people – none of it outweighed the felt reality of grocery prices. The golden toilet billionaire who bankrupted a casino was trusted to fix the cost of eggs. Economic anxiety doesn't make people rational. It makes them reachable by whoever names the threat and points at a target.

What could be better ideological clothing for inhumane actions than to say that you are fighting God's own war against the infidels? Hence, the sordid merger of Trumpism with a Christian Nationalism that is profoundly un-Christian in its rhetoric and actions, willfully ignorant of the nation's founding and principles, and hostile to acknowledging the nation's actual history. What really fuels them? Chief among the reasons former Trump supporters are giving for a change of "heart": The price of eggs is still a problem.

All the ideological posturing in the world cannot hide that about half the voters cared more about a preposterous economic fantasy than a solid record of moral catastrophe, and that a majority of eligible voters did not care enough to cast a vote at all. What we repeatedly discuss as ideological – the role of women, the place of people of color, the lust for theocracy, the empty promise not to go to war, and even racism all play second fiddle to personal, daily economic concerns. These people constantly vote against their own economic interests when the economics is even slightly abstract for them, but they can personally feel the price of eggs.

Seeing things as they are, and using that to become increasingly compassionate are to my mind the two most prominent Buddhist teachings. The Trump movement is built on the deliberate demolition of both.

What Is and Isn't Economics

"It's not just economics," you might say. It's also racism, misogyny, xenophobia – distinct pathologies with their own histories. Fair enough. But notice what each of them does in practice: they define who counts as competition. We don't want women taking men's jobs. We don't want foreigners taking citizens' jobs. We don't want people of color taking White jobs. Tribal solidarity – we tolerate competition within the group in exchange for mutual aid – is the social form that economic competition takes when resources feel scarce and the threat feels personal. This is not a reduction of everything to economics. It is an observation that when economics becomes the proxy for survival, the survival instinct activates everything downstream of it: identity, territory, enemy. The opium merchants needed Chinese addicts to be subhuman. The slaveholders needed Black people to be property. The MAGA voter needs immigrants to be criminals. The mechanism is identical. The currency changes.

Money is not the basis of economics, just an abstraction that facilitates it. Drug trafficking, slavery, politics, misogyny, racism – just different ways of competing for limited resources – economic activities one and all. The trick we actively avoid learning is how to combine our pursuit of economic value with pursuit of our non-economic values.

While economics is the modern version of fighting for daily survival, there is an important difference. Daily survival is self-limited. A day is as long as a day is long. Economics, by contrast, rapidly blossoms into gluttony without bound. Tapping into the survival instinct taps into a mindset in which the end justifies any means. There is no such thing as having too much ability to survive. When we observe gluttony, we lionize those who have uncountably many multiples of what it takes to survive, denigrate those who don't have enough, and squeeze the life out of those in the middle. This is the spell we cast upon ourselves by worshipping economics over all other considerations.

What isn't economics? Everything that is a virtue: love, kindness, generosity, compassion, teaching, healing, helping others. Even these are economic if pursued with a transactional sense of reciprocation rather than true generosity of spirit, but even as transactions, they still compete badly with what is more explicitly economic.

There never has been and never can be such a thing as a free market. Even an "unregulated" market is regulated by default to benefit whoever already has the most power and least accountability. The challenge in America and other capitalist countries is not to protect capitalism from regulation so it is free to perform miracles. The challenge is to honestly answer: Who benefits from a given regulatory structure, at whose expense, and is the expense truly justified, or being excused as if "it's just business" is a valid waiver of moral responsibility.

A fair-minded critic will note that this is not a problem unique to capitalism. Communist parties in power have a reliable habit of becoming the new ownership class, despite their claims about what must be held in common. The through-line is not the economic system. It is what happens when the people who write the rules in any economic system are the same people who "just happen" to benefit the most from those rules. That is a universally human problem, not a capitalist one. Capitalism has focus here because it is the system that shapes the daily lives of people likely to read this article.

Conclusion

America was not at its peak when it played a critical role in defeating the Nazis. America didn't do it alone, and only had as much impact as it did because everyone else, including the Nazis, were exhausted by the time American isolationism gave way. America was at its peak after the war, when the GI Bill and other postwar policies – born of political will, not market forces – created the largest growth of the middle class in history. But policy still unevenly shaped who benefited from that advantage: White males. Not women, except as appendages of men, and not people of color.

When civil unrest combined with postwar ideals in the 60s and 70s, America took halting steps against misogyny and racism, and toward ecology, but like rust, economic pressure never sleeps. Beginning with Reagan in the 80s, we initiated a second gilded age in which the excessively wealthy were given the opportunity to become the unimaginably wealthy, at the expense of approximately everyone, and the planet as a whole. Once again, economics is the defining factor in what is repeatedly framed as if it were ideological differences about governance. With the Citizens United decision, any pretense of balancing economic gluttony with genuine human needs was tossed in the waste bin.

This pattern inheres in people, not uniquely in capitalism, communism, or any particular economic system. It will persist until actively rejected in favor of an approach that dethrones money as the greatest possible good, and explicitly recognizes that, as important as it is in practical terms, money is not the only thing humans need. If we exalt any one need above all others, all others will suffer. If we truly care about our collective selves, about being moral people – or frankly even if we care only for ourselves and those dearest to us – we have to step up to balancing the competing demands of all of our needs, and not let one crush all the others.

There is no such thing as a market free of government policy. The question before us is whether we will stop pretending that an economic system is a replacement for a moral system, and go on worshipping money to the exclusion of our non-economic needs, or do the much harder work of living up to the sort of ideals our poets, ethicists, and religionists remind us about again and again. Rest assured that our non-ideal qualities will continue to assert themselves. It is our ideals that need our active engagement.

"Unregulated" capitalism, or more precisely, immorally regulated capitalism is, unsurprisingly, immoral. It's also stupid in a particularly suicidal way. If the concentration of wealth impoverishes customers beyond a certain point, the market will collapse for a lack of people who can buy things. If the production of excessive economic wealth damages the planet beyond some unknown threshold, it's game over for everybody. These seem impossibly far away and theoretical, and therefore dismissible. But we are some distance down that path right now. Macro-economic markers may look strong, but while the financially elite dine aboard their yachts, 60 to 80 percent of the country (varying with study methodologies) are living paycheck to paycheck, or not getting one. Privatized profit funded by community-borne costs will be the death of us, individually and as a country.

The important questions before us will remain dressed in ideological conflict, framed as debates about what is possible or impossible, when they are merely policy choices. Multiple capitalist democracies (Germany, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada) present existence proofs that universal healthcare, funded or subsidized higher education, and robust labor and environmental protections are entirely feasible. We do not lack the financial means, political mechanisms, or instructive examples to fix what ails America.

Rather than our progress being funded by our economic abundance, that abundance is actively used to benefit the few at the expense of the many. That is a policy decision, or rather a set of policy decisions, or most accurately a policy failure, not an inescapable feature of reality.

If you don't want the price of eggs to be the dominant force in future elections, here is what you and I can do: Be vocal, vote, and do not sit in quiet politeness when family and friends make bad policy decisions as they cast or withhold their votes. Don't tolerate it any longer. Non-tolerance of inhumanity is how the US ended child labor, got the 40-hour work week, and made the partial progress achieved in the Civil Rights movement, the Women's movement, and the ecology movement. Non-tolerance by the majority is the only thing that has ever won any concession from a powerful minority.

We must begin with seeing things as they are. As we see that all people are the same in their basic humanity, compassion is inevitable. When we see rightly and have compassion, we cannot do what is being done, and we cannot sit by the side as others do these things. Even the peace-loving, masterfully compassionate Buddhist monks of ancient China became so clear about what they valued that they had to actively defend it. They invented Kung Fu. All we have to do is speak up and vote.