🚀 go-pugleaf

In ed.general Peter Clinch <p.j.clinch@dundee.ac.uk> wrote:
> M Holmes wrote:

>> There's no allegedly about it. If free trade doesn't benefit one party
>> then they don't volunteer for the trade and therefore it doesn't happen.

> So if a deal goes something like "well, we're screwing you, of course, 
> but you have a free choice not to be exploited and have your family 
> starve and be unable to access any sort of healthcare for them" then of 
> course anyone feeling they're getting screwed will take the latter course?

> I have doubts...

So someone can have his family starving and no health care, and I come
along and ofer them a trade which will provide both, and you have doubts
whether that's improving their situation?

Somewhere there's a Big Clue just waiting for you. Meanwhile you
demonstrate why we should ask the Africans whether something is helping,
rather than the Global Whiners claiming to be acting on their behalf.

>> A common fallacy. Usually the Nike worker is better off with the wage
>> than he was before, and therefore he turns up to work voluntarily.

> Again, he's between a sharp, spiky rock and a hard place. 

Let's leave it to him to decide whether he's better taking or refusing
Nike's offer of work.

>> Note that in India wages in call centres have now risen so much that the
>> call centres are decamping to China. Reckon those Indians would rather
>> you're brand of economic idiocy had shortcut the process and put them on
>> the dole?

> Odd that every group of workers along the chain eventually gets pissed 
> off with being exploited to make someone /else/ *very* rich...

Y'know, it might just be that capitalism brings improving wages, your
fantasies of the Inevitable Progress of the Marxist Dialectic
notwithstanding.

> Well, 
> actually it's not that odd at all, now I come to think about it.

If capitalist exploitation got a whole bunch of Indians out of poverty
then that's a reason for celebration and a resolve to do the same for
Africa.

FoFP