4 ms·

I really don't think anyone in china is going to be more wealthy if they choose farming over sweatshop work.

by wwortiz 16y ago

gaius 16y ago
Possibly not, but shopping there is still perpetuating the sweatshop system. Why not buy a laptop made in Taiwan or South Korea where the people are free?
- Symmetry 16y ago
  Because its usually better to give your money to someone who's desperately poor than to someone who's moderately poor, even if you give less money in the first case than in the second? If you're arguing that South Korea and Taiwan are politically free and that its better to give money to democracies thats understandable. But its pernicious to think that giving a desperately poor person something which is far less than you could give makes you morally responsible for their plight, causing you to avoid helping them at all. South Korea and Taiwan clawed their way up to being only sort of poor through working in sweatshops (and before them Japan did too), the sweatshop system is something we should actually be encouraging in the short term while we work on improving infrastructure and education in poor countries. EDITED: 'if' to 'is'
  - gaius 16y ago
    Because you aren't giving your money to that person - you're giving it to "the system" which says, "hmm, this sweatshop business is great, let's go on doing that!".
    - Symmetry 16y ago
      You're anthropomorphizing here horribly. There's no entity called "The Sweatshop business" that sits around with an evil expression on his face plotting on how to make more sweatshops and taking my money, the system in only an abstraction for the wide variety of people, workers and capitalists, each with their own goals and desires that when taken together produce the things that we call sweatshops. This is important because if you are lazy and rely on anthropological reasoning ("I'm the sweatshop system, of course I want more sweatshops") you won't be able to make correct predictions about how the world will change in response to your actions. Yes my money goes to a person. I hand off my money to the clerk at the store and then it travels around and eventually some of it goes to the suppliers of raw materials, some of it goes into the pockets of the capitalists who provided the funding, and some of it goes to pay the wages of yonder sweatshops workers.
      - gaius 16y ago
        Errm, not in China. They've got a centrally planned economy. There actually is someone who's figured out exactly the minimum conditions for workers to keep the foreign currency flowing. And RMS for all his talk of freedom is advocating propping that up.
        Symmetry 16y ago
        In principle that's quite possible, but China hasn't had that sort of central planning for decades now. What China does do is use its redidency permit system to restrict many of the people who want to move to the cities from the countryside from doing so. This actually raises of the wages of Chinese workers from the $3-4 per day you'd expect given China's level of rural poverty up into the $5 per day range. If China were to become democratic of course there's no way the repressive residency system would last (that's what Item 8 of the Charter 08 is partially about) and the urban workers know this. Thus China tries to prevent democratic revolution (which tends to be urban) by coopting the urban workers. EDIT: Edited a bit for clarity. EDIT2: Actually, reading up on wikipedia it seems that most of the price controls weren't removed until the mid 90s, so I exaggerated when I said "decades". My bad.

I really don't think anyone in china is going to be more wealthy if they choose farming over sweatshop work.

by wwortiz 16y ago

I really don't think anyone in china is going to be more wealthy if they choose farming over sweatshop work.

gaius 16y ago

Possibly not, but shopping there is still perpetuating the sweatshop system. Why not buy a laptop made in Taiwan or South Korea where the people are free?

Symmetry 16y ago
Because its usually better to give your money to someone who's desperately poor than to someone who's moderately poor, even if you give less money in the first case than in the second? If you're arguing that South Korea and Taiwan are politically free and that its better to give money to democracies thats understandable. But its pernicious to think that giving a desperately poor person something which is far less than you could give makes you morally responsible for their plight, causing you to avoid helping them at all. South Korea and Taiwan clawed their way up to being only sort of poor through working in sweatshops (and before them Japan did too), the sweatshop system is something we should actually be encouraging in the short term while we work on improving infrastructure and education in poor countries. EDITED: 'if' to 'is'
- gaius 16y ago
  Because you aren't giving your money to that person - you're giving it to "the system" which says, "hmm, this sweatshop business is great, let's go on doing that!".
  - Symmetry 16y ago
    You're anthropomorphizing here horribly. There's no entity called "The Sweatshop business" that sits around with an evil expression on his face plotting on how to make more sweatshops and taking my money, the system in only an abstraction for the wide variety of people, workers and capitalists, each with their own goals and desires that when taken together produce the things that we call sweatshops. This is important because if you are lazy and rely on anthropological reasoning ("I'm the sweatshop system, of course I want more sweatshops") you won't be able to make correct predictions about how the world will change in response to your actions. Yes my money goes to a person. I hand off my money to the clerk at the store and then it travels around and eventually some of it goes to the suppliers of raw materials, some of it goes into the pockets of the capitalists who provided the funding, and some of it goes to pay the wages of yonder sweatshops workers.
    - gaius 16y ago
      Errm, not in China. They've got a centrally planned economy. There actually is someone who's figured out exactly the minimum conditions for workers to keep the foreign currency flowing. And RMS for all his talk of freedom is advocating propping that up.
      - Symmetry 16y ago
        In principle that's quite possible, but China hasn't had that sort of central planning for decades now. What China does do is use its redidency permit system to restrict many of the people who want to move to the cities from the countryside from doing so. This actually raises of the wages of Chinese workers from the $3-4 per day you'd expect given China's level of rural poverty up into the $5 per day range. If China were to become democratic of course there's no way the repressive residency system would last (that's what Item 8 of the Charter 08 is partially about) and the urban workers know this. Thus China tries to prevent democratic revolution (which tends to be urban) by coopting the urban workers. EDIT: Edited a bit for clarity. EDIT2: Actually, reading up on wikipedia it seems that most of the price controls weren't removed until the mid 90s, so I exaggerated when I said "decades". My bad.