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Politics : Libertarian Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (6206)	9/13/2007 11:38:58 AM
From: Jim S	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13056

"...I really don't want to nit pick about details..." That pretty much says it all. You don't know what you're talking about. Since you don't understand the economics, perhaps you could present a case for just what your perfect world vision would be for underdeveloped countries, and how businesses should participate? I realize that you're incapable of any details, so maybe you could just give us the broad strokes?

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (6206)	9/13/2007 4:58:09 PM
From: Wildstar	Respond to of 13056

I really don't want to nit pick about details while you ignore any moral issues. But how can you talk about the morality of the situation if you're willing to ignore the details of the actual impact of corporations? Consequences are inseparable from morality. I'm not ignoring moral issues; I'm trying to tease them out. The arrival of the corporation with these sweat shop jobs changes the economics of the region. Prices rise and those who don't have sweat shop jobs are now unable to survive in the same economy. I think you're dealing with some very poor economic intuition. But intuition is just that: intuition, a starting point. Once we look at the details, we can move beyond intuition, and sometimes we find out that our intuition is very wrong. So I'm asking you - if you're really looking for the impact of corporations on the third world - to look beyond your intuition. If afterwards, you decide you still hold the same opinion, then you can argue better against people like me in the future. Surely, it's a win-win situation. Nicholas Kristof, certainly nobody's corporate shill, has been writing in the NY Times for many years about the negative impact anti-sweatshop campaigns from the West have had in the third world. His argument, one that I support, is that the third world was mired in poverty long before corporations got there, and that corporations raise the standard of living by providing better paying jobs than exist otherwise. I did a search of his articles and only found this one duplicated at a different site. truthout.org Ahmed, who dropped out of school in the second grade, earns $2 a day hunched over the loom, laboring over a rug that will adorn some American's living room. It is a pittance, but the American campaign against sweatshops could make his life much more wretched by inadvertently encouraging mechanization that could cost him his job. "Carpet-making is much better than farm work," Ahmed said, mulling alternatives if he loses his job as hundreds of others have over the last year. "This makes much more money and is more comfortable." ... "I dream of a job in a factory," said Noroz Khan, who lives on a garbage dump and spends his days searching for metal that he can sell to recyclers. He earns about $1.40 a day, and children earn just 30 cents a day for scrounging barefoot in the filth -- a few feet away from us, birds were pecking at the bloated carcass of a cow, its feet in the air. Of course, Western anti-sweatshop activists mean well and aim only for improved conditions and a "living wage." But the reality is that the bad publicity becomes one more headache for companies considering operating in international hellholes (where the only lure is wages so low that it would be embarrassing if journalists started asking questions about them), and so manufacturers opt to mechanize their operations and operate in somewhat more developed countries. For example, Nike has 35 contract factories in Taiwan, 49 in South Korea, only 3 in Pakistan and none at all in Afghanistan -- if it did, critics would immediately fulminate about low wages, glue vapors, the mistreatment of women. But the losers are the Afghans, and especially Afghan women. The country is full of starving widows who can find no jobs. If Nike hired them at 10 cents an hour to fill all-female sweatshops, they and their country would be hugely better off. Nike used to have two contract factories in impoverished Cambodia, among the neediest countries in the world. Then there was an outcry after BBC reported that three girls in one factory were under 15 years old. So Nike fled controversy by ceasing production in Cambodia. The result was that some of the 2,000 Cambodians (90 percent of them young women) who worked in those factories faced layoffs. Some who lost their jobs probably were ensnared in Cambodia's huge sex slave industry -- which leaves many girls dead of AIDS by the end of their teenage years. The G-8 leaders will never dare, of course, begin a pro-sweatshop campaign. But at a summit that will discuss how to bring stability and economic growth to some of the world's poorest nations, it would be a start if Westerners who denounce sweatshops would think less of feel-good measures for themselves and more about how any of this helps people like Ahmed and Kamis.? The other article I remember reading but can't seem to find at the moment was about Thailand, I think, and the alternative to working for a corporation for most of the employees was either picking trash or working as a prostitute for much lower wages. On what side of the moral calculus do you fall, Sidney?