The US could work toward accepting only made by workers in conditions
meeting minimal standards for human rights. The natural place to start
is with imports from Mexico.
This statement is a non sequitor from the previous claim.
I ask again.
How is the factory worker in the US living extravagently well at
the expense of the factory worker in China?
The US *should* work toward accepting only made by workers in
conditions that meet minimal standards for human rights. However,
that sentiment in no way supports the statement that a factory worker
in the US is living extravagently well at the expense of the factory
worker in China.
BTW, the issue of "human rights" is difficult to discuss in a
country with a vestige of totalitarian communism, where "human
rights" do not exist. Therein lies the rub. That society was
on its way to a utopian vision by removing human rights as a
basic premise.
It doesn't bother you at all to wear an article of clothing made by
workers in deplorable conditions? And, if you didn't violate the
worker's rights yourself, you don't see any connection at all between
his circumstances and your behavior?
It would bother me, but this still has nothing to do with a claim that
a factory worker in the US is living extravagently well at the expense
of a factory worker in China.
You're talking about "human rights", and that's a foreign concept in
China not because it's evolving toward a free market system, but
because it's a communist state that doesn't quite understand such
concepts.
No, there is not rural lawlessness in the US and Germany.
Robbery and killing are unheard of concepts in recent histories
of rural US?
While the story has nothing to do with capitalism or communism, it's an
example of China's deep infrastructure problems. As a society, it
barely works. To say, though, that an imperfect free market system is
working for everyone in China just isn't correct. Rural life in China
has, if anything, gotten worse.
1. This story is not a story that can be cited as an example of
China's deep infrastructure problems. You can cite many things,
but a random story about two thugs killing a policeman isn't it.
You may well cite the case where 3 hillbillys dragged a blackman
to death in Texas a few years ago as "indicative of deep infrastructure
problems in Texas", or whatever you choose to spin it as. Sometimes
it's just a couple of thugs that would kill as they will in any
system.
2. No on claimed that an imperfect free market system is working
working for everyone in China. This would be a strawman.
3. Rural life in China has, if anything, gotten better. It's gotten
better by the millions of migrants that eke out their living on
few ren min bi a day in the shadows of the big cities, scrouging up
every ren min bi they can find, then sending most of that money back
home to improve the lives of their family back home. . . In the
rural areas. What you are failing to point out here it that NO ONE
voluntarily lives a more miserable life. If subsistance farming
in the rural areas is a better life, then no one will leave it.
It is precisely the experience of those that have succeeded previously
that is tempting the young and able bodied folks to leave the rural
areas to eke out the living in the urban areas to be able to send
the money home to the rural areas to improve it.
Do you have relatively that starved to death, or were purged under
a totalitarian regime?
If you did, perhaps you would not ask this question.
But we've already had that learning curve. Why should workers in China
have to go through it, and why should workers elsewhere (textile
workers in other third world countries losing their jobs to China) be
impoverished by workers selling even more cheaply? And why should the
US be facilitating this race to the bottom?
The US (and other industrialized nations) can lend its experience, as
long as the political system in China/India/Thailand/all_developing
nations is amenable to listen/adopt/change. The problem here is that
toalitarian regimes are not amenable to change.
No, thank you. I don't recall your being so tendentious.
Then who has?
What person(s) in this thread has made such overreaching claims of the
wonderfulness and inevitability of free market capitalism as to
necessitate a challenge from you? What were these claims?
Perhaps I should challenge him/her as well, if only I could find
any evidence of these overreaching claims of the wonderfulness
and and inevitability of free market capitalism.
and I even liked the
Mass killings by every conceivable means: bombing, executions, warfare,
terrorism, deliberate starvation, extermination camps, hacking people
to death with machetes, whatever, seem to have taken place more or less
constantly since, say, the beginning of the Twentieth Century. While
some of the killings that have been attributable to Communism have been
particularly egregious, I don't think they come close to dominating the
totals. I could be wrong, but I don't think they do.
"Dominating the totals" is a hard thing to count. Does one count
the intentional starvation of the peasantry, and the untold number
that died of starvation? How does one count these things where there
is no press to report it?
I don't like
*any* of it, and to keep harping on mass killings as a peculiar defect
of Communism strikes me as (a) misleading about what's really wrong
with Communism (central planning just doesn't work, apparently) (b)
major-league denial about how human beings treat one another, even
after the industrial revolution. And free market capitalism *does*
harm many people.
1. Mass killing has been a particular defect of two of the really
big and really nasty totalitarian Marxist/Socialist/Communist
regimes, Soviet Union and China. Even if central planning works
well, it would not have been worth the lives so randomly purged.
2. It appears that the restricted "free market capitalism" as
practiced in most industrialized nations hurts the least number
of people, as compared to any other system you could not point
to. The answer to the fact that it does hurt people in non-
industrialized nations under totalitarian regimes is not to
force those people back under the totalitarian regime and
sacrifice themselves for the glory of the state, but to see
how changes can be made so those people can live in a
industrialized nation under a responsive government that respects
human rights in a "free market system" with the protection so
afforded to the workers of similar nations.
