The ever thoughtful Gary Farber, on a previous post, 'Sweatshops and Ethics:'
Factories where there is total indifference to worker safety, for instance, so that limbs are commonly accidentally chopped off on a weekly basis, isn't, in my view something that should be tolerated just because people are desperate and their children are starving enough that they "voluntarily" take a job there.
Libertarians, last I looked, oppose "coercion." There's plenty of coercion that doesn't flow directly from the barrel of a gun, government otherwise (you forgot to mention "jackbooted"). There's coercion of circumstance. There's coercion of desperation. There's coercion of starvation. These are all equally, in many cases, as coercive as pointing a gun, and render agreements made under their threat of force non-voluntary.
The people who died in the Triangle fire (I trust you're familiar with it), because they "voluntarily" took jobs in a factory where the doors were all chained shut so they couldn't escape, were murdered. I don't think this is the sort of "liberty" that helps make the case for the virtues of libertarianism.
Government makes capitalism workable by enforcing contracts, and many libertarians agree with this. My radical suggestion is that a certain minimal level of regulation does the same thing, and is equally necessary -- so far in history, anyway, and outside fantasy theorizing (which might someday be workable, okay) -- but I don't expect this to be very well accepted by even "lukewarm libertarians."
I would like to think that limb chopping factories are rare. Perhaps I'm naive. A facility like that, one might think, is an example of factory owners making a profit at the expense of laborers, but what about cases where owners are as much a servant to circumstance as the workers, or better yet, where there are no owners at all?
Here's a real world example that happened right here in Colorado. Back around 1858 the gold rush in California was settling down, and some of those veteran miners made their way to Colorado. Some of those fellows learned the mining trade in Georgia. It's a mostly forgotten chapter of American history, but there was a Georgia gold rush before California.
When these guys showed up in Colorado they were very familiar with the hazards of primitive mining. The tinhorns came later, and they became famous for their suffering in the gold rush, many turning back East before the real big finds were even discovered.
Anyway, those first veteran miners knew about the dangers, the cave-ins, the bad air, the unpredictable explosives, that were common to that era of mining. Most importantly they knew they weren't likely to get rich, but rather they just wanted a property of their own and a chance to earn their own way. They came anyway. In no sense was anyone exploiting them, as they owned their own mines, and they pocketed all the profits they produced.
The cemetaries in our mountain towns are testament to the brutal nature of the mining business. In later years the mining companies took over, and the mines were worked by company employees rather than owner-operators. Some of the original prospectors owned the mining companies. As technology progressed and as the mines became profitable they became safer, although to this day they aren't safe in comparison to the average workplace.
So who was more exploited, the owner-operator who took greater risk with the chance to become wealthy, or the mine employee who worked in safer conditions but was only paid an hourly wage? In either case the guy down in the mine is working in his own self interest.
As for the Triangle fire, I've often thought that the wave of government regulation that followed was a classic case of politicians finding a parade and then jumping in front of it. I'm sure workplace safety would have improved even without legislative prodding. This may come as shock to some of my fellow libertarians, but I'm not entirely against regulation, either. But that's fodder for another post.
Posted by Walter at February 18, 2004 08:01 PM"I would like to think that limb chopping factories are rare. Perhaps I'm naive."
Well, yes, I'd suggest doing a little research on factories in the third world. I already gave you a reference when we discussed this here, but it seems you didn't bother to actually go read the series. Tsk.
Alas that I didn't use the long-lasting link at that time. But, here we go. Be sure to go here.
As I said, read the whole series.
"Yongkang, which means 'eternal health' in Chinese, is also the dismemberment capital of China. At least once a day someone like Mr. Wang is rushed to one of the dozen clinics that specialize in treating hand, arm and finger injuries, according to local government statistics.
Unofficial estimates run as high as 2,500 such accidents here each day."
That's just one small city in China, Walter. Extrapolate just how "rare" dismemberment and injury in these regulation-free paradises throughout China, Malaysia, and the whole developing world is.
"So who was more exploited, the owner-operator who took greater risk with the chance to become wealthy...."
It doesn't sound as if they were exploited at all, but were making free choices.
"...or the mine employee who worked in safer conditions but was only paid an hourly wage?"
I'm not clear precisely who you're referring to, but modern mine safety laws have certainly done a lot to make for safer mines.
"In either case the guy down in the mine is working in his own self interest."
Sure.
"As for the Triangle fire, I've often thought that the wave of government regulation that followed was a classic case of politicians finding a parade and then jumping in front of it."
Sure. And hundreds of thousands of people owe their lives to that. Then there's the creation of the FDA; are you familiar with what food factories were like prior to its creation?
"I'm sure workplace safety would have improved even without legislative prodding."
That simply goes against the evidence of hundreds of years of history, Walter. I strongly suggest reading up on the history of the Industrial Revolution, particularly in Britain in the 18th century. Here's one starting place. Here is another (scroll down to "Social and Political Effects"). Try here.
Be sure to read all of the "Factory Act" entries.
As background, try this. Oh, they were wonderful days before evil regulation got involved. Freedom was glorious.
You know, socialism, and trade unionism wasn't invented because a bunch of people were wacky and greedy.
Thanks muchly for the compliment, quote, and response.
Posted by: Gary Farber at February 18, 2004 09:38 PMIncidentally, in the Triangle Factory Fire:
Eight months after the fire, a jury acquitted Blanck and Harris, the factory owners, of any wrong doing. The task of the jurors had been to determine whether the owners knew that the doors were locked at the time of the fire.Posted by: Gary Farber at February 18, 2004 09:56 PM[...]
Customarily, the only way out for workers at quitting time was through an opening on the Green Street side, where all pocketbooks were inspected to prevent stealing. Worker after worker testified to their inability to open the doors to their only viable escape route -- the stairs to the Washington Place exit, because the Greene Street side stairs were completely engulfed by fire. More testimony supported this fact.
[...]
Twenty-three individual civil suits were brought against the owners of the Asch building. On March 11, 1913, three years after the fire, Harris and Blanck settled. They paid 75 dollars per life lost.
I've spent a few years living in third world countries, China not included. I've never seen anything quite as severe as the NY Times describes.
As for the Industrial Revolution, I'm pretty well familial with the history, and I see things from a different viewpoint - government actively engaged in union bashing and sided with factory owners in matters of worker safety. When things finally turn around it hard for me to see gubmint as the hero.
I gotta rush off now, more later. Libertarianism isn't anti-union, and as you saw at the end of my post I'm not entirely anti-regulation, either.
If there is a correlation between government and workers safety I would argue that countries with the least oversight of business have the safest most productive workplaces. The heritage foundation ranked all the countries throughout the world on economic freedom, or the places where the government interfered the least with business and the top scorers are places with the safest work environments even though the government stays out of the way. The countries where the government has the most regulations on business are the ones that scored the lowest and also that have the worst working and living conditions. (The US ranked 10th on the list). The real advances in worker safety have not come from government regulation but from advances in technology and strong property rights that favor investment and development in safer technology.
See this link for more detailed information
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/countries.html
Thanks for the link, Severin. I would argue there's a link between government oversight and prosperity, with some qualifiers. There's a strong link between prosperity and worker safety regardless of government involvement. It's much more important that people are prosperous than regulated when it comes to workplace safety.
Posted by: Walter at February 19, 2004 09:19 PMIt's an interesting list and set of details.
Various points stand out: you can be as socially, statistly, repressive, as Singapore, and get higher marks than the US, or anyone else on earth besides Hong Kong, another garden spot of political freedom.
The UK, generally considered by US conservatives and libertarians both to be a flaming hotbed of socialism, land of the dread "nationalized health" is freer than the US.
Denmark, another evil socialist Scandanavian state, the same. And Sweden, considered by the same to be the most evilly socialistic country on earth that's not a communist dictatorship, is just a shade under the US.
Heavens.
Posted by: Gary Farber at February 20, 2004 01:14 AM"I would argue that countries with the least oversight of business have the safest most productive workplaces."
OK. I'll listen. Go ahead.
Posted by: Gary Farber at February 20, 2004 01:15 AM"I've spent a few years living in third world countries, China not included."
Interesting. Would you care to name them?
"...government actively engaged in union bashing and sided with factory owners in matters of worker safety."
Yes, that was certainly true.
"When things finally turn around it hard for me to see gubmint as the hero."
It's not an issue I care about; that's a difference between me and many libertarians. I have no stake in the goodness or evilness of government, nor belief that "government," per se, is inherently one or the other. It's a matter of what kind of government, and how it is structured, and who it is responsible to, and what its powers are, and so forth, that make it more of a force for bad than good or good than bad.
"Government," per se, doesn't, in my book, get to be a "hero" or a "villain." A particular government does.
Of course, governments are vast and contradictory beasts constructed of warring forces, so they're always a mixed bag, at best.
But Teddy Roosevelt and his allies, outside and inside the government, did a lot of good things against "the trusts," in my book. Would that the current Republican Party had such values. (Or the Democratic Party, I should add.)
"Libertarianism isn't anti-union, and as you saw at the end of my post I'm not entirely anti-regulation, either."
And at risk of stating the obvious, unions can be corrupt and sometimes do more good than ill, and, of course, regulation is also, at best, a mixed bag. No sane person is for regulation for its own sake, and most regulation carries penalties of inefficiencies and costs with them. No one is simply "for regulation." It comes down to weighing the specifics of a given regulation. Skepticism about them is entirely healthy, and I'm 100% for skepticism as long as it does not become blind and deaf (as you, happily, are not).
Posted by: Gary Farber at February 20, 2004 01:25 AMLibertarians, last I looked, oppose "coercion." There's plenty of coercion that doesn't flow directly from the barrel of a gun, government otherwise (you forgot to mention "jackbooted"). There's coercion of circumstance. There's coercion of desperation. There's coercion of starvation. These are all equally, in many cases, as coercive as pointing a gun, and render agreements made under their threat of force non-voluntary.
This isn't "coercion". To imply so is bastardization of the word. The examples you mention might be tragic, heart-rending, and deserving of sympathy, but they are not coercion. The teenager who decides to take drugs due to peer pressure is not being coerced. The Muslim woman who decides to keep wearing a burqa for fear of ostracism is not being coerced. The man who joins the military for fear of getting shunned by his neighbors is not being coerced. Nobody is forcing them to do anything. They make these choices of their own free will. They give consent. Don't bastardaize the word "coercion" into something it doesn't mean.
The factory workers choose to work there because it is better than all the other alternatives in their own eyes. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. You might say that it isn't fair that the alternatives are so bad, but that is not at issue. Yes, the conditions during the Industrial Revolution were bad, but the workers chose to work in the factories, because the alternative - working on farms - was worse. As bad as those conditions were, they were a huge improvement over the working conditions in the 17th century. I take Walter's view that the factory owners often used govt to screw over workers, and that is coercion. But at the same time, unions used govt to screw over their fellow non-union workers, which is also coercion.
See this (now dead) NY Times article by Nicholas Kristoff:
“Nhep Chanda averages 75 cents a day for her efforts. For her, the idea of being exploited in a garment factory — working only six days a week, inside instead of in the broiling sun, for up to $2 a day — is a dream. “I’d like to work in a factory, but I don’t have any ID card, and you need one to show that you’re old enough,” she said wistfully. […]“I want to work in a factory, but I’m in poor health and always feel dizzy,” said Lay Eng, a 23-year-old woman. And no wonder: she has been picking through the filth, seven days a week, for six years.
The factory conditions are better than the alternative in the eyes of the workers themselves. These factories were bringing these "coerced" workers out of poverty, just like the Industrial Revolution brought most of the population out of poverty, instead of leaving access to the good life only a property of the rich.
Setting that aside, even if I were to accept your premise, that somehow the factory owners are holding these workers hostage against their will without their consent...
...any sort of intervention necessarily screws over workers because it limits the number of exchanges that are possible. I know this is 180 degrees from what you think, because govt is seen as a magic spell cast to reorder the word. Don't like the wages? Pass a minimum wage law, and viola! The same number of workers now magically work at higher wages. Don't like other people doing drugs? Pass a law, and magically people stop doing drugs. No thought is given to the incentives and real-world consequences of govt action.
If there were to somehow be a world-wide minimum wage created to "help" these workers, or if the US imposed tariffs on these countries to stop the "exploitation" (or "coercion" as you call it)of these workers, the result would be throwing them back into the garbage dumps, as companies would have no reason to hire them instead of first world workers. It's the same thing with other types of regulation. I don't think you realize how much minimum wage laws, workplace regulation, red tape, etc hurt the poorest in society. I don't expect you to believe this, but hey, I'll get my views out there, and give it a shot.
Posted by: Jonathan Wilde at February 20, 2004 11:15 AM""I would argue that countries with the least oversight of business have the safest most productive workplaces."
OK. I'll listen. Go ahead. "
Well if government oversight of business can make work environments safer then Cuba, communist Russia, China, and Eastern Europe would be bastions of safe work environments, they were and are not (however Russia and Eastern Europe are improving as they become feer, China as well). Comparing current countries is a much more relevant comparison then to compare the US 100+ years ago to the US now as technology has grown and made work environments safer. In the US the type of industry that dominates has changed from a farming/industrial and mining economic base to the much safer technology, information and service industries as our economic base. So even without government intervention in the US the overall work environments would be much, much safer and the vast majority of the laws are not only not needed but become counter productive as they prohibit certain business's from even opening here because there is no way to make them safe (or it just cannot be made cost effective), adding to our unemployment and placing us at a disadvantage over other countries.
As for the observation that some countries that are considered more socialist by the right wingers are still freer then the US, is not surprising to those of us that follow world wide freedom since some socialist countries do not intervene in business nearly to the extent that the US does, a good example would be with taxes, in the US taxes are placed on business property, income, employee matching taxes, the burden is placed on business to act as tax collectors etc, placing large burdens on business. In many countries however they only have a few taxes to provide all their social services and the majority of the money is raised through a national sales or vat tax, leaving a very low tax burden and a low amount of tax related paperwork for business. This is just one example of many where even socialist countries are friendlier to business than the US is.
"The teenager who decides to take drugs due to peer pressure is not being coerced."
Agree.
"The Muslim woman who decides to keep wearing a burqa for fear of ostracism is not being coerced."
Disagree. It might be mild. That would depend on the circumstances. Or it might be severe. If you live in an isolated community, in a culture where your family support is the only way to survive, it might literally be life or death. But even mild coercion is coercion. If I threaten to flick your nose fifty times unless you do something, I'm still attempting to coerce you, even if my attempt will be unsuccessful.
"The man who joins the military for fear of getting shunned by his neighbors is not being coerced." If it's in the US, and he doesn't give a damn, correct. On the other hand, the neighbors are attempting to coerce him, it would seem.
"I know this is 180 degrees from what you think, because govt is seen as a magic spell cast to reorder the word."
Yes, that's exactly what I think. You know what I think. It's uncanny.
You have convinced me of your powers of analysis with that frightenly accurate observation.
Posted by: Gary Farber at February 20, 2004 02:45 PMGary asked me to name the countries where I've resided - Colombia for several years, Mexico for not quite so long.
Posted by: Walter at February 20, 2004 06:59 PMTO: Walter
RE: Libertarians as Anarchists?
"This may come as shock to some of my fellow libertarians, but I'm not entirely against regulation, either." -- Walter
Interesting observation. And I think it might actually be correct. My understanding of anarchists is that they espouse the same ideals. They're just a bit more 'assertive' of those ideals.
Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[I don't mind anarchy. As long as it doesn't get out of control.]