Psst. Hey, wanna hear a secret? You’re paying too much for coffee. Shocked? Angry? Don’t be. After all, you asked for it. In the past year, student advocacy groups all across the country have been petitioning their respective campuses to stop selling “regular” food in their student dorms and cafeterias, and instead sell “fair trade” food.

Here at De Anza, we’ve yet to be brought to that extreme, but one of the hallmarks of the new food service annex in the remodeled Campus Center is that it markets coffee that’s Fair Trade Certified, which is a fancy way of saying two things: first, the organic farms from which these products are bought receive an above-market price for their goods in order to encourage “sustainable production”, and second, these farms receive an added premium to be spent (at their discretion) on “social and economic development.”

Let’s first dispense with semantics: “fair trade” is something of a misnomer. It implies, by design, that our everyday system of economic exchange, in which the consumer is free to spend his money on the cheapest product available, is somehow unequitable. After all, who’s going to argue that they’re for “unfair trade?”

Fair trade’s proponents often rant about how corporations and “the Man” are exploiting hardworking, puppy-eyed farmers. But the truth is, small farms are unprofitable because, as Joel Stein of the LA Times says, “they’re the remnants of a job field that, (due to) technology, has been shrinking since its inception. Farmers are just a half-step up from fire starters and cave painters.”

Stein is alluding to the fact that all professions, eventually, go the way of the dinosaurs. And what’s more, that’s a good thing – otherwise nothing new would ever be produced, and prices would never come down. 500 years ago, calligraphers all over Europe suddenly had to find new work. Was “unfair trade” to blame? No, it was a guy named Johannes Guttenberg, and because of him we can now all afford books.

“Fair trade” is simply a euphemism for a system in which consumers are given the option to subsidize the livelihoods of people that can’t support themselves. But the English language already has a word for this type of behavior – we call it “charity.”

Of course, charity isn’t valueless. You’re paying for that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you help out others less fortunate. But because that feeling has a price, and can thus be marketed, the most vociferous attacks on fair trade labeling haven’t come from politicians on the right, but rather from those on the left. Fair trade shows that the free market is capable of delivering socially responsible outcomes, and that huge government subsidies, like those currently given to U.S. farmers, are unnecessary.

Are there drawbacks to fair trade? Sure. It can distort pricing, encouraging excess supply and lowering revenues, thus paradoxically defeating its own aims.

But overall, fair trade is a noble idea, and its nice that the Campus Center implements it. Yet students should know exactly what it means. After all, isn’t the whole point of charity that it’s given voluntarily?