"Right and Wrong" in the Third World

I recently took my first Rickshaw ride. I did not know exactly where I was going, but had someone from the restaurant speak to my rickshawalla in Bangla so I would end up in the right place. I prenegotiated the price at 20 Taka (approximately 30 cents) and away we went. 30 minutes and several wrong turns later I had him drop me off on a road I knew was close (and only about 5 minutes from my apartment) and walked from there. As the ride had taken longer than he had expected, he wanted more Taka. When I resisted and tried to give him a 20tk bil, he would not take it from me, and insisted on at least 50tk. I was frustrated from the pointless wandering around Gulshan, and so I ended up basically putting the 20tk onto him and walking away.
Looking back, I realized that I had been unwilling to pay 80 cents for thirty minutes of hauling me around the streets. Was I justified? What makes a "fair price" in Dhaka? What makes a "fair price" on my conscience? This experience, and ones similar, sparked an interesting discussion with Jimmy and a couple other colleagues a couple nights ago that turned into a bit of a debate. The question at hand was whether because we had the means to do so, we should pay more for services rendered by poor Bangladeshis. There are a few major issues at hand:

1. People in Bangladesh have no money. Every foreigner I know is a extremely upper class in this society. We have surplus money and eat meat daily. Most Bangladeshis can no longer afford to buy much meat if any because the world wide price of rice has sky rocketed in the last 18 months. We can afford to pay more every time.
   
2. There is a market value for everything. To pay more than the market price is somehow counter-intuitive, just as it is to hold out on a poor person. There is a "worth" assigned to things here and when you live in a country it is arguably your duty not to impose your values on that society. Also, if the market value for foreigners is established as twice that of locals because some foreigners don't want to bargain with the impoverished, everyone has to pay more.
   
3. We foreigners have our own value of worth. Is it worth more than a dime to haul me in a bike for 10 blocks, certainly. There is an equation that I have used my whole life relating work to worth and it seems tied into a kind of morality of worth. Can I use this system at all in a place like Dhaka?
   
4. There is a phenomenon that occurs when foreigners overpay for services like Rickshaws. When rickshawallas realize that foreigners (obvious because almost all are white or East Asian) will pay three to five times more than a Bangladeshi person can, they will work less but only for foreigners, which can cut people who cannot pay those prices off from the services they need. Ergo, richshaws will abandon the people who need them as a cheap form of transportation for the higher profit ratios of foreigners. This is probably more applicable in a market, where if white people will buy fish for 20tk when it is worth 5, the owner will not sell to Bangladeshis for 5, especially when white people are around. Thus, though a foreigner may feel like he is being a "good person" by giving more money than is necessary, he may be a part of a system that has a devastating effect on the total economy of the country.
   

In the end, some people were strongly opposed to paying more, where I, in the instance of the rickshaw, could stomach paying slightly more. My reasoning is that Dhaka is a city of 13 million people and probably about 10 thousand wealthy (read: always have some income) foreigners. There are probably 500,000 rickshaws in the city, and maybe 200-500 foreigners who regularly ride the rickshaws. I have ridden a rickshaw once in three weeks, and almost everyone who can afford to has a driver (only about $150 a month). Therefore there is no demand for rickshaws in the foreigner community, and foreigners certainly cannot support or even change the standards of the everyday rickshawalla. I have maybe seen 5 other white people on rickshaws in the month I've been here. There is already a "white tax," as we call it, on Rickshaws, so if you pay that then you've been generous on a relative (to their standards) scale. People who ride the rickshaws regularly and have the ability to alter the market standards are shrewd enough not to be overcharged, so only fools like me who occasionally ride will overpay.
Also, there is practically no tourism, so the Dhaka markets are not riddled with foolish tourists who overpay and alter the dynamics of the economy. This can be and is a serious problem in some parts of the world that are impoverished but have a decent tourist industry. The economy of a nation should serve the locals more than foreigners, and too much foreign money spread unwisely can disrupt this balance.