However, now that fair trade coffee has achieved a substantial presence in the marketplace, along comes a concerned member of the Neoliberal Thought Collective just in time to insist that you only hurt yourself by purchasing fair trade coffee. Primarily, the critique rests upon a standard neoclassical economic argument about misaligned "incentives": it is asserted that whenever prices rise, co-ops sell their inferior beans to the FLOI system and reserve their quality stock for the utterly free market in specialty coffees—in other words, the fair trade brand dupes clueless café liberals into paying more for a crappier cup of coffee. Unabashedly taking a page from the left, this critique also suggests that the FLOI funds don't really trickle down to a substantial degree to the peasant level, and that free trade has proven little more than a marketing ploy that channels much of the profits back into advertising. It is not that these questions have been settled by concerted empiricism—they have not—but the payoff comes in the moral of the story: if you had capitulated to the wisdom of the totally free market in the first place, everything would have worked out just fine.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 411