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To: TimF who wrote (8078)	2/4/2012 1:16:14 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Respond to of 85487

...PLAYBOY: Even if minimum-wage laws have been as counterproductive as you say, isn’t there a need for some government intervention on behalf of the poor? Laissez faire, after all, has long been synonymous with sweatshops and child labor—conditions that were eliminated only by social legislation. FRIEDMAN: Sweatshops and child labor were conditions that resulted more from poverty than from laissez-faire economics. Wretched working conditions still exist in nations with all sorts of enlightened social legislation but where poverty is still extreme. We in the United States no longer suffer that kind of poverty because the free-enterprise system has allowed us to become wealthy. Everybody does take the line that laissez faire is heartless. But when do you suppose we had the highest level of private charitable activity in this country? In the 19th century. That’s when we had the great movement toward private nonprofit hospitals. The missions abroad. The library movement. Even the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. That was also the era in which the ordinary man, the low-income man, achieved the greatest improvement in his standard of living and his status. During that period, millions of penniless immigrants came in from abroad, with nothing but their hands, and enjoyed an enormous rise in their standard of living. My mother came to this country when she was 14 years old. She worked in a sweatshop as a seamstress, and it was only because there was such a sweatshop in which she could get a job that she was able to come to the U.S. But she didn’t stay in the sweatshop and neither did most of the others. It was a way station for them, and a far better one than anything available to them in the old country. And she never thought it was anything else. I must say that I find it slightly revolting that people sneer at a system that’s made it possible for them to sneer at it. If we’d had minimum-wage laws and all the other trappings of the welfare state in the 19th century, half the readers of Playboy would either not exist at all or be citizens of Poland, Hungary or some other country. And there would be no Playboy for them to read. PLAYBOY: Aren’t there any government programs that can successfully improve the lot of the poor? FRIEDMAN: The actual outcome of almost all programs that are sold in the name of helping the poor—and not only the minimum-wage rate—is to make the poor worse off. You can take one program after another and demonstrate that this is the fact. Indeed, by now, I’m getting a lot more company than I used to have on this point. In a recent Brookings Institution report, the authors of Great Society programs such as the War on Poverty now admit that those programs spent a lot of money but accomplished very little except to create employment for a lot of high-priced poverty fighters. Sometimes these programs have been well-meaning—those who are naive about the laws of economics think the best way to help the poor is to vote them higher wages—but often they are outright subsidies to the middle class and the rich at the expense of the poor. PLAYBOY: Please explain. FRIEDMAN: Take aid to higher education. In my opinion, that’s one of the country’s greatest scandals. There is an enormous amount of empirical evidence that subsidies to higher education impose taxes on low-income people and benefit high-income people. In the state of California, over 50 percent of the students in government-financed institutions of higher learning—the University of California, the state universities, junior colleges and all the rest—come from the upper 25 percent of families by income. Fewer than five percent come from the lower 25 percent. But even that understates the situation, because what really matters is what the incomes of the people who go through college will be after they get out of college. If you have two young men, one middle class, who goes to the university, and the other poor, who doesn’t—who goes to work as, say, a garage mechanic—the one who goes to college with obviously make more money over his lifetime. But the man in the garage will be paying taxes to support that other man’s education—and perhaps his draft deferment. When I’m being demagogic about this. I say that the system in California is one in which you tax the people of Watts to send children from Beverly Hills to college. jeepers1.wordpress.com

To: TimF who wrote (8078)	2/4/2012 1:17:53 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 85487

Shouldn’t Sweatshops Do More? By Matt Zwolinski On November 3, 2011 · 43 Comments · In Current Events, Exploitation, Social Justice Sophisticated critics of sweatshop labor recognize that sweatshop jobs make workers better off, but argue that sweatshops should do more to improve the lives of workers – that they should make them even better off by paying higher wages, or providing better working conditions. In a thoughtful post at Running Chicken, Ari Kohen raises precisely this objection to my recent post on sweatshops. Sweatshop jobs, he notes, are a boon to workers in the developing world only because those workers are desperate. But why should corporations take advantage of that desperation for their own profit? Kohen says that he’d be willing to pay more for ethically produced goods. And if companies won’t produce ethically on their own initiative, we should use legal regulation to compel them to do so. My opposition to such regulation suggests to Kohen that I’m a libertarian first, and a bleeding heart only when it doesn’t interfere with my prior and overriding commitment to libertarianism. Jeff Miller responds to Ari with what I think is an important part of the correct answer: if Ari wants to pay more to help poor workers abroad, then what’s stopping him from doing so? He doesn’t need to wait for sweatshops to get their act together. He is free to give as much of his money as he wants to charities that help the global poor. Miller’s response sounds glib, but it makes an important point. Why do people think that sweatshops should do more to help workers in the developing world, especially since (as I’ve noted elsewhere on this blog) they already do more than most of us do to help? Or, more precisely (since we can all grant that it would be good for sweatshops to do more to help, if they could do so without producing counterbalancing unintended negative consequences) why do people think that sweatshops have an obligation to do more, perhaps one that should be legally enforced? I suspect there are two main reasons at work: Workers in the developing world are in great need of additional help. Sweatshops are well-positioned to provide that help. But these reasons alone cannot justify a special obligation on the part of sweatshops to provide more help in the form of higher wages, better working conditions, etc. Obviously, there is nothing in (1) that would generate such a special obligation. If great need of assistance generates a normative claim on others to provide that assistance, then, ceteris paribus, it would seem to provide that reason for everyone. And while (2) might look like it provides a reason that applies only (or especially) to sweatshops, this appearance is deceiving. First, (2) overestimates the extent to which sweatshops can help: competitive pressures make it harder than you might think to help workers by compensating them at above the market rate. Second, (2) underestimates the extent to which the rest of us can help. In the olden days, ability to help might have been closely tied with physical proximity. But not anymore. Today all it takes to help is a few clicks, starting with this one. So (1) and (2) by themselves can’t justify a special obligation on the part of sweatshops to do more. If sweatshops should do more to help the working poor, it is because the poor need help and sweatshops are able to provide it. But since all of us are able to provide help, the obligation to provide it is one that falls on all of us – not just sweatshops. Indeed, to the extent that sweatshops are already providing help and we are not, we are further away from meeting our obligations than they are. Sure, sweatshops aren’t helping workers out of a sense of altruism. But is that really what matters? If you put yourself in the perspective of one of the world’s poor, who are you more grateful for: a sweatshop that provides you with a (relatively) well-paying job in order to maximize its own profit, or an American company that acts with the purest of intentions, and so refrains from outsourcing overseas at all? bleedingheartlibertarians.com