Damn you Walmart!!!

However, WalMart had - ruling of the North Rhine Westphalian State Labour Court accepted by them - violated the Basic Law.
And they lost a couple (dozens) labour law trials at lower labour courts.

Ok, I'll bite... why are sweatshops a good thing? And, how do you define do-gooders?

Comparing a giant multinational to black people is an apple to orange idea.

A long time ago, I was poor enough that I had to steal food to keep from starving to death. When that period came to an end, I was afraid of my kleptomania. Surprise, with some money in my pocket I could not steal anymore.

JPB wrote:

Ok, I'll bite... why are sweatshops a good thing? And, how do you define do-gooders?

For the people who work there, sweat shops in the third world are a huge improvement over the rural poverty they replaced -- a poverty that was less visible to us, but frequently lethal.

Only if you view "good" in terms of economic well-being. There are, however, other "goods" that cannot be measured in monetary terms.

You mistake economics for accounting. (Not for the first time, I might add.) Contrary to what you imply, I am not measuring economic well-being in monetary terms alone -- and neither would any real economist. Instead, I am measuring them by the preferences third-world workers reveal when they give up their old job for their new one. In determining these preferences, people do consider any non-tangible costs and benefits there might be to switching.

But I'm curious: In your opinion, what non-monetary benefits are there to living on a garbage-dump in the Philippines, or as a loan-slave on the Bangladeshi countryside, or as a disposable concubine of some wealthy Indian land-owner? And how do these non-monetary benefits make up for the better pay in American sweatshops?

I'm not defending Walmart and I don't think mom and pop are evil. I'm simply speaking from experience.

I have been ripped off by mom and pop. I have changed my tune to trying to buy local goods and products. In my "local" that means Nike and Intel too, plus Adidas and Columbia and a lot of other big brands.

I was the "mom" of a mom and pop shop of a national franchise and I know that people didn't understand that our store was "mom and pop". I invested everything I owned and didn't own into it. I busted my ass to hire and keep good people, I paid them well and gave them good benefits. When we stopped being profitable enough to do such things I had to close the doors. I'm not a charity. I can't work for free just to make sure that other people are happy. Sorry.

People thought our store was some big corporate giant - not me and my husband, not mom and pop. We had to roll with their punches as well as ours.

And, yes, it hurt. And now I work only for me.

Go ahead and hate Walmart. I really don't care. I don't even know where one is. I just think your generalizations and lack of understanding of how business works is well..... dumb.

It is easy to sit on a high horse when you haven't risked anything.

JPB wrote:

Ok, I'll bite... why are sweatshops a good thing? And, how do you define do-gooders?

For the people who work there, sweat shops in the third world are a huge improvement over the rural poverty they replaced -- a poverty that was less visible to us, but frequently lethal. If trade sanctions were to force sweatshops to close down, they would push people back into this rural poverty. For a 1500 word version of the argument, I recommend Paul Krugman's 1997 article In Defense of Cheap Labor.

I'm happy with Webster's definition of do-gooder: "an earnest often naive humanitarian or reformer". I probably would have emphasized the 'often naive' part more strongly.

In general, we can expect people to sacrifice a lower-order good for a higher-order one. When a person, however, has to choose a low-wage job in order to survive, one is entitled to question whether, in that kind of situation, applying the basic economic calculus makes any sense. After all, we usually don't say that a person may "choose" starvation as a valid option. For individuals in that predicament, it's less a choice than a compulsion, so to say that they make an economic choice is somewhat deceptive. As the Athenians told the Melians a couple of millenia ago, the strong do what they will, and the weak do what they must.

Just because they make a choice, that doesn't mean that they make the right choice.

I will add, however, that, for some people, living on a garbage dump is probably preferable to living in a gutter, and being a loan slave or a disposable concubine is probably better than whatever alternative is offered to those people. Whether the alternatives are worse because they are less economically rewarding is something that I do not know, but I do know that people place a value on non-monetary goods that often lead them to make decisions that economists would regard as incomprehensible.

Once I was discussing land mines and the misery they cause for the local population. Someone explained to me that old-fashioned mines used to take off a whole leg. The new and humane mines only rip off the foot.
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According to that reasoning, some modern land mines are humane and should be admired.

An evil is immoral. Comparing it to a bigger evil does not make it moral.

I personally know a number of people in the high-tech sector who have lost jobs and are now facing financial ruin.

For the people who work there, sweat shops in the third world are a huge improvement over the rural poverty they replaced -- a poverty that was less visible to us, but frequently lethal. If trade sanctions were to force sweatshops to close down, they would push people back into this rural poverty. For a 1500 word version of the argument, I recommend Paul Krugman's 1997 article In Defense of Cheap Labor.

'Free the slaves? Why, that would be downright irresponsible. They're too ignorant to take care of themselves. Without their Massa they would never survive.'

The distinction between choice and compulsion is philosophically interesting, and I agree with everything you say about it. But in assessing the merits of sweatshops, I find it mostly semantic. In my language, sweatshops have offered many third-world-people the choice of not starving. In your language, sweatshops have reduced the compulsion on many third-world-people to starve. Tomeyto, tomuhto, poteyto, potuhto -- it's just two complimentary ways of saying sweatshops brought progress.

As a logical matter, that's true. But as a matter of practical politics, people tend to make better choices for themselves than for otherse. Hence, whether or not sweatshops are preferable to the choices available before they arrived, the people most likely to get the choice right are the third world workers. It isn't the US Congress, in which none of these workers has a vote.

So your answer to my question is that you can name no specific non-monetary advantages of the jobs available to third-world-workers before the arrival of western sweatshops. Is that fair restatement?

Libertarians and free-market economists agree with you that people generally make the best decisions for themselves. That's why I think libertarians and free-market economists are all optimists regarding human nature. I remain a pessimist.