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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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Saturday, November 8th, 2008 06:29 pm (UTC)
Not at all. I firmly agree the developing world needs to develop faster. However, everybody knows this. Even the evil corporations which you believe have an imperative to keep wage prices artificially low know this.

The only problem is that corporations aren't evil, they have no imperative, and the wages aren't kept artificially low.

Good and evil are moral statements. As such, they cannot be ascribed to nonsapient entities. There is no imperative to keep prices low; there are, however, incentives. The wage prices are not artificially low: the Malays who work for $10/day do so because it's a higher wage than they can earn in the fields. There is no cabal enforcing a $10/day price ceiling on Malay labor, which would be keeping wages artificially low. Instead, the wages earned by the Malays are the result of the free market.

If you want to posit the existence of coercive effects by the Malaysian and/or United States governments, fine, I'd probably agree with you on that. But the cure for that is to change the government, not to change IBM.

I repeat: your idea is bogus and counterproductive. To the extent you're saying "the game needs to change," fine, everyone agrees, which makes it trivial. To the extent you're saying "this is how we can change it," no, the economics doesn't work.

Free trade, for all its problems, has historically been not just the most effective way of lifting people out of poverty, but the most effective by such a huge margin that nothing else even comes close.

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