Topic: Solution to poverty - Socialism or Capitalism? - page 22. (Read 30791 times)

As you may already know, legal framework is always in flux and should reflect the needs of society at the present time.  Regulations are added or subtracted as needed.  

What you are proposing is currently illegal for under 14 in US.  I would protest that type of deregulation for reasons of consent.  I dont think minors have ability to consent to matters they have no experience in and it would increase their. chance for exploitation.  And also I believe that society thrives on education.  If suddenly a large population of children chose work over school we cannot remain competitive in future generations

By today's skill need standard, kids in our "educated" country are already uneducated, ignorant peasants. They give rise to uneducated, ignorant peasants adult working for the rich for squat.
It seems the sooner you leave school the better you are. (I admit there might be some rare schools of exception, but I have not meet it yet)
I am the trainer in charge of retraining them when they are out of school for my customers.

I will ask you : Have you ever talked with a kid working in a clothing factory in Bangladesh ?
If you have you will find either that he is happy to do it, or, if he is not, he is forced to do it, which is why I said voluntary child labor with the alternative choice to go to school.

And in modern economy it won't be manual labor but intellectual labor. Where the real need is.

Yes. That's what we need in the world. More uneducated and ignorant peasants to work for the rich for squat. Children no less!
Do you own a clothing factory in Bangladesh?

By which standard, you can decide who is weak and need to be protected, and who is strong and need to get robbed ?
To which standard can you point out to someone and tell he is exploited ?
Who judges what the asymmetry is ?
On what standard  the bureaucrats of Washington can judge that the trade between two persons he does not know is asymmetrical, and thus coercion on the strong one should be used to be fair ?
Don't you think that in such system, the bureaucrats will eventually get bribed ?

If an employer is prevented by law to fire his employee, and his employee is not doing his job and profit his position, who is exploited, who lost his free will ? (it is what happen in France)
And then you wonder why enterprise are so fearful to employ someone and on the defensive.
I don't care since I profit from it with my higher rates as fire able consultant, but I am much more secure and free than any employee can be, and always dealt equal to equal with my customers on my free will.

For labor laws, you guessed it right, I am for voluntary child labor, where the child can decide if he works, where he works, and for how much and trade himself for it.
It will solve the dilemma of school being out of touch with economic needs. (Economic need is nothing but the need of society)
The condition of schools today are way worse than work.

All you are saying is all historical roads lead to the present.  We are debating regulations vs no regulations.

My position is that it is because of regulations (for example labor laws) that contribute to the conditions that allowed economic output to increase

No my argument is regulations enable free trade.  I argue against the libertarian position that the free market (unregulated) is always right.

You cant separate business from ethics.  Impossible.  To think so is naive or delusional.

If I want to argue child labor from an economics point.  I can just compare economic performance of places that regulate child labor and places that don't.  

The problem I have w libertarian ideology is that it is disconnected from reality.  I reject the idea that free will means exploitation is not possible.  If you make a contract w a child and he has free will to agree.  Do you think our laws shoukd honor that agreement?  This is what im talking about.  Not whether some poor family in Bangladesh needs their kids to go to work and pitch in.  The only reason I brought up child labor is to show that not all trades are symmetric.  In reality a lot of trades are assymetrical due to power relationships.  This is why we need regulations.

Sigh... This thread is depressing. I think if we want a modern solution to what is causing allot of problems for people, then we should
backtrack our history a bit and see what went wrong, and is still wrong. Such as how WWI and II being planned for many years prior
for the ultimate purpose of consolidating wealth, property and assets. Look who benefited most. It's not you, not me. Not even the
majority of billionaires. Only the ultra mega rich insiders to the monopoly child's game have gained the most.

The funny part about this is, these ultra rich type are brick dumb. Can't even tie their own shoes most of them. The main reason they
do what they do is because they are born and bread human predators and are good at targeting people who don't have true passion
about their history. Then when they tell us how history went and we don't like what they said, we get blamed for ending up in an
economic and cultural mess. Then when we or legitimate acting media takes issue with something, we get fed a slew of terms, lingoes or
slogans that label many people as socially undesirable so that we turn on each other and bicker the subject at hand into a puddle
of feces. And not many people would look at a pile of feces for closer inspection, nor do others want to look at a pile of inspected feces.
If we deserve better(and we do), we must prove it by not being mind slaves and getting baited over every cheap psyop pop culture issue.

There will always be rotten people harming others on Earth, but what's worse are the people who adopt the rot pushed onto them
and spreading it to their children, friends and associates. Once we are so dumbed down, the psyops work on autopilot. How about
creating our own psyops, brainwashing ourselves into a more functional naturally existing human form. That would be great, and legitimate
government will follow. How else did formerly A+ rated nations come to exist in the not so distant past? They did things more in
accordance with nature. But tough luck. Many of us are addicted to counterfeit natures and are viciously ignorant. I myself am not
excused from this type of description and I desire to see myself as an uncompromised individual human expression.

Anyway, how the heck did we get all the way to 2014 and the vast majority of people are still not critical thinkers. Or at least have
a deep concern in not making bad critical decisions. Decade after decade, the same mind games are played out on the public and
we gobble it up like a greedy bottom feeding catfish already hooked by 100 other fishers in the same month. And just like a mindless
fish, we do not feel the pain of the hook penetrating our flesh(fish do not contain the anatomical portion in the brain that allows for
the conscious processing of pain. A fish only can process the sensation that there is trauma and it needs to escape, but it is not
deterred from making the same mistake in the future, as there is no pain for it to comply with and no motive to learn). We just
keep coming back for more and more. Bait after bait, hook after hook, net after net. Sounds like mind control because I certainly
don't subscribe to the idea that humans are just too dumb to manage ourselves. 10,000 years of recent human history is something
to stay perpetually excited about and live our lives around. We don't need to live with amnesia like a fish does.

   If thats your point of view, then I don't really think you understand what "ethics" are.  Certainly you've missed that different people hold different ethical views and value assign them different values and priorities.  You apparently hold child labour in far off lands paramount, another might find employment of local population has greater importance. 

The question you pose isn't simple "yes/no", though most would answer "no" to exploitation there are other factors.  Someone might prefer that there isn't child labour in a far off land, but wants to cloth their child or earn a wage, which trumps their objection to sweatshops.

Also, a libertarian view on the "free market is right" is from the point of view of economics.  Not ethics. This illustrates perfectly my point that they should be separated. 

Do not compare the condition of today with sweatshop of yesterday.
Compare the life of the worker in sweatshop in a city yesterday with the life of the farmer in the country before yesterday.
Sweatshop was a big deal and an improvement on the alternative. You can't say anyone exploited them, nobody put the gun on their head to flee the country side.

It is great that labor union made things better when it was not at the cost of the tax payer. (ie without using state coercion for their own purpose)

Well too bad for you that in Western world we already have labor regulation in place.  Do propose to undo those regulations?

You dont have to trick anyone to exploit them.  They willingly allow themselves to be exploited when faced w worse options.  However, this doesnt remove the ethical aspect of the exploit itself.  Like i said free will is a red herring

Either you dont know what a sweatshop is or you think it can't exist because free will and free market.  I find this to be naive

Union labor were great when it made economical sense for workers to union for their own benefit, they should do it.
But, in France for example, union labor became very weak when condition of work became better, and workers started to like their job.
The success of their mission cause their own natural death.

As all organization, it tried to defend itself, as a single organism, selfishly.
So what they have done, is to ask to government for subsidies. They got it, and get it every times they create a strikes. (Have you wondered why French people have a reputation of being lazy and always complaining ?)
They also do it, like my mother experienced, by blackmailing workers that do not join them.

These union labor would die without government support, because the condition of work are not so bad now as they were during their full power.

Without these union labors artificially kept alive, creating strikes on tax payer money, and keeping employers on the defense, employers and employee would collaborate better.
It will happen again officially or not, that employers unionize to control wages, then it will slowly become economically profitable to workers to unionize again.
Labor unions would rise again, but this time for a real need, and not artificial one. And it will win again.
It is an eternal balance to equilibrium, the root of the movement is selfishness, we should acknowledge.
The only way to stop selfishness is coercion, but this is not what society wants, and unfortunately there is not other way.

The sooner government realizes that it is not his goal to settle the quarrel between two parties, the better. Except if there is violation of individual property.
Subsidies, tax break, and welfare is a form of justice whose sole judge are politicians. But this is not the goal of the government as it bypass the legal system, rendering justice tradable against favor.

If people are accepting these jobs out of their own free will and when other jobs are available then they are not at all being exploited. Exploiting someone would be when they would be tricked into accepting a job and then paying them much less then what is promised.

On the surface this sounds great.  It would be nice not to have so many stupid and inefficient laws and methods for doing things.  The problem is that too many people have different definitions for different things.  And there are a lot of people that (at least seem to) lack commonsense.  If you don't spell things out precisely, someone will figure out how to take advantage of it.  I think that the first and perhaps most important prerequisite for something like this to work is that everyone would have to care about other people as much as they do themselves, and they'd need to be willing to sacrifice for them.

You cant solve w law but law should reflect society's ideals

Those examples arent issues of ethics.  I would say things like child labor laws, workers rights are issues of ethics.

Thats why i don't buy the libertarian ideal of "free market is always right".  They ignore the existence of power in reality .  Libertarians can say people cant be exploited because free will.  Common sense says the opposite.  People get scammed or exploited all the time.

Racism, ageism and sexism will always be here. You can't solve every social issue using law alone.

Is it ethical to deny people employment opportunities to maintain protectionist trade relations?  Is it ethical to exploit the consumer by only allowing them to buy local produce, at greater expense.  

Or should we separate ethics and economics and address them individually?

Have you even been to India and other developing world? Most people in the 3rd world have to struggle constantly to get food on the table in case you do not know.

I am sceptical of anything that ends with "ism" as in socialism,communism,capitalism,facism,totatilarism....lets just have a democracy with social justice for all without the will of one dictating the will of many and vice versa.Is there a system called commonsense?Over regulating and making too many ridiculous laws and overjealous political correctness lead down the slippery slope to tyranny.

Not everyone whos working for a much lower paycheck is desperate, since the costs of living vary across the globe.
Thats why Indians are working for pennies , and still manage to live on that pretty good.

It is in the hands of the working people to fight for their rights, but they dont do so, they just keep hoping someone else is going to fight their fight, and that is why most of them are poor and unsatisfied.
Its every man for himself, and if ure not though, ull get overruned by stronger ones, just like in wild nature.