Sobbing, a woman holds a small Beanie Baby up to a camera. The shot cues in on her face, and beneath enormous sunglasses we see deep rivulets of tears burrowing through her pancaked foundation. The camera falls down to the Beanie Baby, a battered camel, and an authoritative narrator informs us that this woman purchased Humphrey the Camel for more than $700.

“Now,” she says, anger regurgitating in the back of her throat, “it’s worthless. There should be a law to protect us from this.” She honks into a Kleenex and disembodied hands appear from off camera to offer condolence and comfort.

I watched this whole scene go down on Indianapolis local news in the summer of 1998. A friend and I were sharing a bowl of ramen on her “couch” (a fifth-hand futon held together with duct tape and rat droppings) in a battered old farmhouse that rented for $350 a month. My friend shared the shack with her two roommates, one of whom heard the story from the other room and joined us on the couch, rubbing his scabby head in disbelief. “Dumb bitch,” he said, “that’s two months rent.”

Throughout the mid-1990s, any number of Beanie Babies could fetch upwards of $500. Rowdy lines formed outside toy stores. McDonald’s moved countless child-sized hamburger meals with mini-Babies in each box. Eastern European drug gangs laundered millions of dollars through “counterfeits.” Adults became simpering grab monsters in a mad dash to “invest” in these toys, which were manufactured by Ty for a unit cost of under 10 cents an animal. The phenomenon almost single-handedly turned a then-obscure eBay from a small group of stamp traders into the auction mammoth we know today.

So what makes an otherwise functional human adult think 10 cents in third-world cloth is worth more than a month’s rent or a ticket to Paris? If you managed to stay awake in Econ, you know the value, or price, of goods and services is determined by the marketplace—based on what Sucker A is willing to give Sucker B for Sucker B’s pile o’ crap.

With thousands of competing interests on all sides of any transaction, true value emerges, and the free market system smugly marches forward with a middle finger to the face of a communist bread line. This assumes, however, that PI, or perfect information is available. That is, Sucker A knows all there is to know about Sucker B’s pile o’ crap. That in the desire to line his pockets, Sucker B hasn’t somehow failed to mention that his Star Wars sheets are infected with smallpox, he has replaced all the coolant in his Vespa engine with chicken blood, and his tuna casserole causes facial polyps and crippling gas.

As if the onus on the seller’s honesty in this transaction weren’t high enough already: To ascertain accurate value requires a buyer to be a rational individual capable of coolly assessing worth via all available facts, removed from emotion and irrational desire. What percentage of transactions in consumer America do you think pair a rational buyer with an honest seller? If you guessed “probably a really low percentage,” I think you and I are on the same page and could go get some $4 coffee drinks together—your treat.

This mass miscalculation in judgment is neither modern nor uniquely American. In the 1630s, a small virus outbreak among tulips in Holland created a flower frenzy that elevated the cost of some bulbs to the present equivalent of $60,000—bulbs that can currently be bought for 50 cents down at your local garden center.

The so-called South Seas Bubble of the 1730s gave England the dubious distinction of the world’s first stock market crash. Though the British government hyped the monopolist shipping company’s stock heavily, warfare and foreign competition brought in much lower profits than were promised. This small piece of reality, however, did little to kill demand for a piece of the action. Driven by corporate propaganda, investors bought shares and futures on credit and margin, running the stock’s price from 175 pounds a share up to 1,000 pounds, which prompted all the directors of the company to sell off their shares, which in turn caused a massive plummet in the stock’s price.

By the time the damage had been done, shares were hanging down around 135, savings of thousands of investors were wiped out, and bankruptcies threatened national stability. Mobs took to the streets demanding justice. The company was investigated by a royal committee and found to be, get this, rife with corruption, offering inflated estimates of future earnings to drive the stock price. In the wake of the meltdown, most of the executives fled the country, leaving lower level managers to take the heat. The public lost faith in their financial systems and politicians promised to clean house. Sound familiar?

Over the years, speculations in gold, silver, oil and all sorts of junk have raised values tenfold before crashing below their initial prices. Invisible money, created and lost. Metaphysics in practice. Such speculation has its social costs.

Take the case of Albania. In the mid-1990s, a pyramid-like investment scheme, conducted in cahoots with the national government, resulted in nearly half of Albanian citizens losing their entire life savings. The ensuing economic collapse plunged the already troubled country into chaos, making it an Eastern European paradise for gun dealers, drug runners, car thieves and terrorists—and left the beaten population longing for the good old days of communism. The unrest spread to neighboring Kosovo where, without an Albanian nation to object or an organized army to retaliate, ethnic Albanians in that country were now fair game for marauding bands of Serbs who, stoked by the fiery nationalist rhetoric of their leaders, had been waiting for a chance to rekindle the ethnic slaughter that had been going back and forth for centuries. Thousands of Kosovar refugees fled to Albania, getting robbed, kidnapped and shot along the way—with ammunition sold to the attackers by Albanian crooks in their own country.

As also demonstrated by Afghanistan, Colombia and the Sudan, failing nation-states breed drug trafficking, kidnapping and other high-profit crimes, with funds often going towards putting weapons into the hands of people who probably shouldn’t have them. It was in the chaos of the Albanian interior that Serbian militias were able to fund their uplifting social movement to ethnically cleanse their sacred homeland of non-Serbians. Ethnic war spread across the Balkans to neighboring Bosnia, and, millions of corpses later, pretty much everyone was left broke, homeless, wounded, defeated and miserable—everyone except the clever few who managed to use the whole situation to make a few bucks.

Lest we think stupid speculation is left to history, uneducated foreigners or to middle-aged hobbyists in the Midwest (dot-com stocks anyone?): Even though most tech start-ups were good for little more than losing millions a month and throwing nicely catered launch parties, the stock market went wild for tech in the late ’90s—shaky business models be damned. People were making millions and economists started jabbering on about the “New Economy,” where the old frumpy notions of price/earning ratios and actually making money were a thing of the past.

Case in point: With an initial private offering of $9 a share, Globe.com saw its value rise to $97 a share on the first day of trading, an increase of 877 percent. Its price reached a low of $1.80 a share shortly before it was dropped from the Nasdaq. Though many worthless companies were rightfully punished for their rotten ideas, many legitimate companies lost funding after the bubble burst as well, and well-earned stock prices with even the smallest taint of tech took the bullet train to the basement where they were summarily stripped and shot.

Okay, but those are stocks. Imaginary money. Investments. How good is our market at assigning value to other things? Like people? Not very. Consider Tiger Woods, who made over $80 million last year. I’m sure he’s a perfectly decent millionaire, but let’s be honest. Tiger Woods never helped you move. He never watched your kids while you were earning your teaching certificate in night class. If anything, Tiger Woods has been somewhat of an annoyance to you, appearing on your television in an endless appeal to sell you cars, hamburgers and athletic shoes.

As a result, yes, you will buy a car you can’t really afford in an attempt to inflate your own self-worth, eat a hamburger that’s the nutritional equivalent of plutonium because it provides a muted sense of pleasure, and pay $100 for a pair of athletic shoes despite the fact that the only physical activity you engage in with any regularity usually results in an orgasm. Each of these poor, irrational decisions add to the confusion of the marketplace that, at the end of the day, informs us that Tiger Woods is worth more than all the people you know put together and multiplied by 10,000.

But why pick on Tiger? Peyton Manning, a quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts, was apparently worth $42 million last year. Andre Agassi was worth $28 million—for little more than smiling awkwardly for his corporate sponsors. The Olsen twins, Jessica Simpson, Bill O’Reilly and many other semi-talented shitwads make more money in one year than most of us will ever see in our entire lives.

Meanwhile, the average CEO makes 300 times as much as his or her average employee. Not lowest-paid employee, average employee. During our most recent recession, while much of the country was busy being judged as valueless, i.e., unable to find a living wage, CEOs enjoyed a 15 percent increase in their overall compensation, with a 22 percent increase for those CEOs at larger corporations.

When Delta Airlines assured its unions they would have to accept cuts in pay and benefits and layoffs were inevitable, CEO Leo Mullin took a raise that made him $13 million in 2002 alone. (He recently left the struggling airline with a $16 million retirement package.) When the LTV steel company announced bankruptcy in 2001, it cut 50,000 jobs and cancelled pensions of retired workers who had dedicated their lives to the company—and then gave its top 111 executives parting gifts that averaged a cool $1 million each. And to reward himself for driving the company into the ground, LTV CEO William Bracer walked with more than $2 million.

Fair? It must be. It’s what the marketplace dictates. Right?

Nope. The system suffers from irrationality, greed and, in the case of the CEOs, easy manipulation by those at the controls. Reality has no place here. Our current consumer economy is almost completely based on emotional exploitation and manufactured wants. Our nation’s economic well-being has come to center itself on the trivial, the unnecessary, the unhealthy and the intangible spectacle. Is this a good idea? To look at falling real wages, the staggering loss of quality jobs, cuts in public services and the further concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, one certainly doubts it.

This economy is at its worst when it actively promotes irrationality through official channels. Talking heads in stuffed shirts will seemingly defend American CEO pay to the death, even though it’s a turnoff to foreign investors. To turn on MSNBC in 1999, you would have to be a drooling idiot not to be margined to the hilt with tech stocks. In Albania, the financially challenged government actively worked with the scammers. During the Great Depression, brokerage houses extended tons of credit and encouraged investors to buy far more stock than was fiscally responsible. Credit-card companies blanket struggling families with offers of cheap money while happy caterpillars sell them high-interest payday loans and tax refund rip-offs on television commercials run during the local news. Corporations like Enron, Tyco and Worldcom announce their fake earnings with straight faces, their numbers complicity backed by formerly respected accounting houses like Arthur Andersen.

And when these perps do get found out, nothing happens. The feds slap some wrists, the business press says “a few rotten apples,” the rest of us shrug off our shrinking 401(k)s and belly up to another rerun of Seinfeld.

So, we’ve got the big boys calling their own shots, consumers making poor decisions and a culture that rakes in huge profits assuring us that it’s all normal. But it seems the real issue in assigning market value is an absolute unwillingness to plug morality into the equation. True, rarely does morality regulate the marketplace. Drugs, bazookas and child pornography are all illegal to the general public (which, ironically, increases their value). But these are exceptions. Morality has no place in a market transaction.

For example, when the Bechtel corporation was allowed by the World Bank to “privatize” the water supply in Bolivia, its first step upon setting up shop was to lay off thousands of Bolivian water workers. The company then let water pipes in rural areas crumble so it could concentrate on more profitable urban lines. Firmly in control, the company jacked up water rates for the poor, and made generous contributions to local politicians in trade for the use of their police forces to attack citizens naively demonstrating against the supposed “unfairness” of this new arrangement. Silly protesters, the market has set the price. Bechtel’s stock value has increased. The company is now worth more.

When the market states that if you can’t afford to buy water, you should die of thirst, all of a sudden a $700 stuffed camel starts to make sense. So what’s the solution?

Don’t buy it.