Shine On

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

In the context of free markets, I am not really sure I believe that “market failures” exist in the wild. It isn’t that I cannot imagine free markets producing outcomes that are, as the economists say, “Pareto inefficient,” meaning that at least one person could be made better off without making anybody else worse off. It’s just that every time I’ve tried to get a specific example of the phenomenon, I end up with something indistinguishable from “market failure is what happens when a market produces an outcome different from the one most desired by the economist with whom you are having this fruitless conversation.” For example, cigarettes and alcohol are sometimes offered as examples of a particular kind of market failure (“demerit goods”), but that really just comes down to the median economist’s preference that people would smoke and drink less than the median drinking-and-smoking person’s preference dictates.

That being said, there are many outcomes from the most free of free markets that seem perverse to me. Few people ever complain that the prices of the things they buy are too low, but shoeshines, for example, seem to me to be significantly underpriced. A $3 shoeshine at Grand Central Terminal seems somehow just metaphysically wrong in a world of $6 coffee and $10 cupcakes.

There’s a whole not-entirely-pleasant social history related to the question of who shines shoes for whom, of who labors at the feet of whom, of racial callousness that once had middle-aged black men described as shoeshine “boys,” etc. But there is something of the democratic tendency in there, too: There’s a famous and probably apocryphal story about Abraham Lincoln receiving a European diplomat while polishing his boots. The diplomat said that in his country, a man of Lincoln’s stature would never shine his own boots. “Whose boots would he shine?” Lincoln asked.

Still, we think of shining shoes as menial job rather than as a semi-skilled profession. But the whole point of the division of labor is that other people can do things better or more efficiently than you can; properly understood, there is no such thing as menial labor. The brain surgeon gets to spend an extra 20 minutes on brain surgery because somebody else shines his shoes; capitalism is as much a cooperative enterprise as a competitive one. The cattle rancher and the McDonald’s cook and the poet and the investment banker all work together to ensure that the cattle get raised, the hamburgers get cooked, the verse gets written, and whatever it is that investment bankers do gets done. If each of us tried to do it all ourselves, our standard of living would be Paleolithic.

Every so often, somebody goes off on a campaign against tips, or against employment situations in which waiters and bartenders and the like rely on tips rather than on a guaranteed hourly wage. I tend to think those crusades are ill-considered, but maybe we should change our compensation model for shining shoes. Instead of $3 or $6 (the average airport rate, I calculate), we should go with 5 percent of the value of the shoes — one of the few forms of progressive redistribution I can get behind. If you’re on your way to a job interview and getting a fresh new shine on a pair of $60 cap-toes off the sales rack, you pay the current going rate of $3; if you’re wearing a $400 pair of Allen Edmonds wingtips, you pay $20; if you’re wearing a $2,000 pair of Prada dress shoes, give the guy a C-note and count your blessings in life. We might want to establish a customary price ceiling for John Lobb’s bespoke-service customers and the like.

New Yorkers already have a model for this: In most of the city’s commercial garages, it costs about twice as much to park a Maserati as it does a Toyota Camry, even though exotic cars don’t take up any more room than do Buicks. Presumably, this is because of insurance risk, which men shining shoes don’t take on, but we frequently pay people more to take care of that which is more valuable. Sending a postcard from New York to Los Angeles costs one amount, sending a Warhol costs another.

Democratic immigration activists such as Eva Longoria argue that we need a class of semi-indentured serf labor — they don’t put it quite like that — because if we paid market rates to farm workers, we would have to pay “$8 for a head of broccoli,” angels and ministers of grace defend us! Eva Longoria carries a $26,000 handbag and she’s arguing that we need illegal labor to keep the price of broccoli down below the price of a Starbucks venti Frappuccino — that’s a very, very odd take on social solidarity.

Personally, I’d prefer a world in which a really good shoeshine operator makes six figures. We’re all in this together, after all.