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Tragedy of the Commonwealth and the Vision of Wendell Berry, The
Georgetown International Environmental Law Review, Spring 2006 by Stewart, Nathaniel
Just as Berry's protectionism risks harming the commonwealth's newest industries by privileging the established over the upstart, his proposals targeting low prices and "our so-called cheap food policy"299 similarly risk disproportionate harm to the commonwealth's poorer members. This is because food and disposable household products comprise a greater percentage of a lower-income family's monthly household budget than they do for a wealthier family. Assume, as an oversimplified example, that the Smith family of four with an annual income of US$30,000, spends US$10,000 per annum on food and household items; it has spent one-third of its gross income on those products. Assume that a second family of four, the Jones family, with an annual income of US$300,000, enjoys a fifty percent increase in its food and household product allowance over the Smiths, spending US$15,000 per year for additional and higher premium goods and foods. While the Joneses may spend more than the Smiths' US$10,000, they are unlikely to spend the ten times more, or US$100,000, that it would take for their food budget to equal one-third of their household income. Thus, any protectionist policy that would artificially raise prices on food and household items in order to support producers or local businesses such that the Smiths would pay, for instance, $12,000 and the Joneses $17,000, would have a disproportionately adverse effect on the Smiths. The $2,000 increase represents six percent of the Smiths' gross income, and it would leave them with only sixty percent of their annual earnings to meet other needs; whereas that same increase represents less than one percent of the Jones's earnings and therefore affects their remaining budget to a far lesser degree-making it even harder for the Smiths to keep up with the Joneses. Admittedly, this is a crude, unscientific example of the regressive nature of protectionist pricing, but it illustrates the problem that opposition to low prices on goods and services poses for lower-income families. Thus, Berry's antagonism toward "our so-called cheap-food policy" suffers from the very real possibility that it will hinder the active participation of the commonwealth's lower class in the economy, while doing little to "level" the economic playing field.300
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Berry's proposed barriers to free trade present significant hurdles for the lower economic echelons in the commonwealth. Designed to combat the free market's so-called system of winners and losers, to protect local producers from the vagaries and hostilities of that market, and to provide both large and small merchants with the "same economic justice," Berry's proposals may have an opposite and tragic effect. His prophylactic measures to insulate the commonwealth from the larger economic structures may in fact prove most harmful to those he most intends to help.
D. THE PROBLEM OF "PERSONS": THE CORPORATE BODY & SOUL
Finally, substantial academic and cultural debate persists over the legal and economic justifications for affording corporations the legally fictional status of the "corporate person." Much of that debate lies well beyond the scope of this article, but Berry's opposition to large corporations and the "folly" of their "personhood" so permeates his writing that it is worth briefly highlighting two conceptual difficulties with Berry's underlying objection.301
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