Pauper and Sweatshop Fallacies

[alice wellintown]

Why would I deny it? Why would anyone who knows a bit of history, who
reads the newspapers, who has read One Hundred Years of Solitude,
M&D...any decent narrative about colonialism, orientalism, a but of
Said or [insert your choice here, but please no Howard Zinn or Oliver
Stone ;-)]?

This is not the issue I'm raising, for is too obvious, and sometimes,
as Paul Simon sez, "sometimes, even music is no substitute for tears."

But the blind and irnorant attacks on business-people and economists
and anyone who doesn't carry that little red book and support the
occupation of, of, of, like....whatever...dude.

It is far easier, as McKeon taught us, to criticize than to
understand. Understand first, then criticize. A-and like whatever
happened to pluralism?

On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 3:42 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>  alice wellintown quoted:
>
>
>> one never teaches the Ricardian model without emphasizing precisely
>> the way that model refutes the claim that competition from low-wage
>> countries is necessarily a bad thing, that it shows how trade can be
>> mutually beneficial regardless of differences in wage rates.
>
> a) trade, maybe...but supranational corporations relocating already
> profitable enterprises to take advantage of low wages, lax ecological
> requirements, tolerance for child labor & abusive supervision, et al,
> and - can you deny this - interfering with political process there to
> keep things that way, so that predatory growth rates can seem to
> justify exorbitant executive & shareholder pay  --  that isn't trade,
> really, is it?
>
> b) it's like the old, "we have to support this dictator to oppose
> communism and we do not interfere in their internal affairs"
> canard...(like, by supporting the dictator they aren't already
> interfering in the internal affairs?)