Doug Mackenzie wrote:  
If I'm hungry I buy food not an umbrella (and at the lowest price). If  
I need a bridge built I hire engineers not  
musicians(and at the best wage)- who would deny that  
people seek effective means to satisfy ends?   
   
  
I am sure he means to say the best wage for the narrator, meaning the lowest wage the
builder can pay. There is an institutional context to such reasonable choices, as the
current media stories about two large retailers, Costco and Wal-Mart illustrate. Costco
pays its workers good wages, is satisfied with its performance, but Wall Street is aghast
at the company's operations. Much pressure is being put on it to change its errant ways.
Wal-Mart on the other hand....The conflict seems to be in how the two firms view their
goals. Whatever Wal-Mart's claims regarding the benefit of low prices, their treatment of
employees has been shown to undermine those claims.
   
John Stuart Mill, in his writings on methodology of science in general and political
economy in particular had some interesting observations regarding socio-cultural
differences between England and the U. S. vs Continental Europe and how they factor into
the economic theory itself.  All theory needs assumptions and political economy is based
on axiomatic behavior of individuals, implicitly drawn from observations . He writes:
   
In English political economy...empirical laws of human nature are tacitly assumed by
English thinkers, which are calculated only for Great Britain and the United States. Among
other things, the intensity of competition is constantly supposed, which, as a general
mercantile fact, exists in no country in the world except those two. An English political
economist, like his countrymen in general, has seldom learned that it is possible that
men, in conducting the business of selling their goods over a counter, should care more
about their ease* or their vanity than about their pecuniary gain. Yet those who know the
habits of the Continent of Europe are aware how apparently small a motive often outweighs
the desire of money-getting, even in the operations which have money-getting as their
direct object, (cited in their JHET , Vol. 21 No. 4, 1999,  article by Samuel Hollander
and Sandra Peart).
   
*The different approach to vacations by the Europeans and Americans comes to mind. That is
not to say that the same drive for pecuniary gain is not spreading globally.
   
Sumitra Shah