Friends, Family, Countrymen,
I thank you all for your readership. And I'm excited about how active the comments have been for the past few posts. I notice no one commented on my poetry... figures.
Anyway I don't get many comments on this blog, but the ones I do get are usually considerate and well thought out, and it is a signal to me that the Campground is blossoming into what I hoped, a discussion place or free speech zone. So thanks again.
Uncle Tom,
I've often wrestled with this economic issue. Deprive sweat shops and you deprive sweat shop workers. I cannot truly suggest that I know what will happen when you boycott sweat shops. Perhaps I can find a case study to enlighten myself. Anyway, my argument in this post will not hinge on how we deal with sweatshops, but rather, my point is a message of hope regarding sustainable living. You expressed doubt about the capability of a local economy to provide for the people. To try and address this doubt I want to take the question out of the ethereal realm of this human invention called money, and bring it back to a basis in land.
For your consideration:
If you want to fight poverty, you must also fight wealth.
I'm certain this isn't an original thought and It might even be a direct quote from someone far smarter than myself, but the way I'm figuring things, it makes perfect sense. The way these people became impoverished and forced to work in sweat shops was that a colonial power took proprietary control of their land. All that we own comes from the land. Aldo Leopold said, "Heat doesn't come from the furnace and Pork doesn't come from the supermarket."
Microsoft computers don't come from the mailman, they come from the land. The problem isn't that the people who lose sweat shop jobs will be unable to buy their commodities, it is that they have no land from which to produce these commodities. Why? Free trade took their land away. All the humanitarian laws, the environmental regulations, the equal opportunity laws, work against free trade. They assert social values onto a system that profits the obliteration of those values. This is what approaches europe's system of a social democracy or a social capitalism. Free trade must become wise trade. Subsistence economy.
Liberte se trouve, en effet, completement dans l'imagination de la gouvernement, et les gens qui ne lisent jamais un journal quotidien.
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3 comments:
Well, I just got home. I've been hoping you'd read and respond to my previous post, and while I don't agree completely with you, I can agree with your sentiment.
I'm sorry I don't have a lot of time right now to argue all of your point, but let me get to one or two right now.
I don't believe it's true that the main reason people became impoverished is that they had their land taken away by colonial powers, although of course I agree that colonial powers did take land unjustly and did cause no end of injustice and suffering and even poverty. But I think it's important to realize that until quite recently in historical terms (and if you think in terms of how long humans have been around, it's relatively speaking until only a microsecond ago) most people all over the world, even in the same colonial powers, lived in absolute poverty. And while the colonial powers took away the land of the people, they in large part stole them not from the peasants but from the local rulers. I know you're not arguing that the rapacious colonists were inherently worse than the equally selfish but perhaps less powerful monarchs.
Years ago I read an article in the Smithsonian with the title "Money is the root of all..." and after "all" I think there was a choice between "evil" and "civilization". I don't remember all of the reasoning very well, but the idea was that the invention of money was something that actually helped the growth of civilization.
Getting back to the first point, the very poor of the developing world have been poor for eons (just as most of humanity was until just an historical moment ago). (Colonialism's part in their continuing poverty tells only part of the story).
I don't think it's true that to "fight poverty, you must also fight wealth." Certainly, nobody can argue honestly in favor of the absurd extremes of wealth and poverty that exist in this country (although of course in this country we are talking about relative--not absolute--poverty). But that doesn't mean that everybody should be limited to what he or she can produce today. Isn't wealth just the accumulation of value? The possibility of wealth also provides people an incentive to work and be productive, and the accumulation of some amount of wealth can allow people to support themselves after they no longer can work or in their old age when they should no longer have to do so. If you cannot accumulate any wealth (i.e. store the value of what you have produced) than your survival/subsistence is limited to what you can produce right now. If you can store the fruits of your labor so that you can eat tomorrow, next week, next month or next season, you are (even without money) accumulating wealth. You are doing the same if you are saving your money for next year, for the next ten years, or for the years until you retire, which could be many more. To categorically deny wealth, you must insist that people keep only what they need for right now. If tomorrow a blizzard strikes that keeps everybody from working for two weeks, everybody dies.
I'm not arguing that we should all go about diligently accumulating as much wealth as possible and do nothing for anybody else. I absolutely agree with you that laws and regulations are needed to keep free trade from being an unstoppable force serving only greed and ignoring the needs of society. So we agree that unrestrained individualism is not the way to a better future. But I absolutely believe that completely restrained individualism and absolute prohibition against private property are a recipe for an unhappy world.
One more thought, and I'll let you go. I would really recommend you read a book by Jeffrey Sachs. (the End of Poverty) the story about the Bangladeshi women came from that. Another story came from there too, and I think it makes an interesting point in favor of trade (btw, I think it is generally agreed that the Rennaissance itself resulted largely because of trade): Antwerp, Belgium was particularly well situated in Europe. I forget the details of the geography and the exact time, but it was at one time among the most prosperous cities in Europe, as it was on a port, I think along a river (please excuse the limits to my geographical knowledge) which was a main trade route. Over time, the port became full of silt, and the city (it may not even have been Antwerp) did not do enough to keep the port clean and navegable. What happened? What was a center of Europe turned overnight (in historical terms) into a backwater, and its prosperity didn't recover.
I really recommend this book. Sachs is one of the true good guys in the world. He has spent a huge amount of his time advising governments to help them solve their problems, and he now runs a project essentially committed to ending poverty. He believes its possible, he knows that it will take billions in government and private funds.
He supports free trade, but he also realizes that free trade won't help every situation and that many countries will need to get a boost before free trade will help them.
I keep trying to leave, but more ideas come to me, so bear with me for a second while my dinner burns...I also take issue with your arguing about the origins of the poverty of the poorer countries. Regardless of how they became poor, they are now very poor. Trade is making them less poor. If we could set up aid programs that would make them prosper, I would recommend that, and I do think we should be doing all we can to help these countries, but free trade (and again, I don't mean completely free, without any restrictions or regulations) is also helping, and it may even be helping more than charitable assistance in many places. We would both need more information either to prove or to refute this last statement, but my reading leads me to believe that trade is actually an equalizer. So to argue that we shouldn't support the trade that can lift (has lifted) millions of people out of poverty because it's our fault that they're poor seems unfairer still.
I'm glad you're thinking about all of these issues. I don't for a minute pretend to have any perfect solutions. But I also think that the solutions to these problems lay not in simply pondering and trying to derive a perfect society from our thoughts. It needs research as well on what has been done and what the results are.
I guess we can argue again later. I enjoy it.
This is a great discussion. I was glad to see Adam's comment about free trade, because I was pretty sure that Tom would respond.
Keep up the good work, guys!
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