Call it the Walmart problem:  So cheap!  But are the labor practices unethical?  What about supporting the local economy?  What about third-world workers?

But so cheap!   Oh, so very cheap!

So we’re of two minds: we’re consumers but we’re also citizens.  It’s a real debate, and it’s sketched well here:

The awkward truth is that most of us are two minds: As consumers and investors we want the great deals. As citizens we don’t like many of the social consequences that flow from them. The system of democratic capitalism in the Not Quite Golden Age struck a very different balance. Then, as consumers and investors we didn’t do nearly as well; as citizens we fared better.

What’s the right balance? Are our gains as consumers and investors worth the price we’re now paying for them? We have no real way to tell. The old institutions of democratic capitalism, and the negotiations that took place within them, are gone. But no new institutions have emerged to replace them. We have no means of balancing. Our desires as consumers and investors usually win out because our values as citizens have virtually no effective means of expression — other than in heated rhetoric directed against the wrong targets. This is the real crisis of democracy in the age of supercapitalism.