Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonuser123456 | Hacker News Reader

'Labor laws' is a bad argument, particularly in poor developing nations.

If you enforce labor laws in developing countries, the cost of production will be high enough that industry doesn't develop. At that point, the people there have no industry and are much worse off (e.g. a sweatshop is better than subsistence farming).

A better argument is 'labor choice'. Individuals need to have the ability to choose their circumstance. If they can choose, and choose freely, over time the whole society can ratchet up their standard of living by making these choices at the margin.

View on HN

That rosy picture is totally divorced from the actual historical course of Capitalist development.

On the contrary, it's debunking the rosy picture that developing economies can afford developed-economy levels of worker protection.

I don't think you successfully debunked it. You asserted without merit that working in sweatshops is better than subsistence farming, this is both false and a false dichotomy.

It wasn't me, but in any case, that was just an example; even if untrue, it doesn't invalidate the point that choice is the important part.

What about slave labor? Child labor? Should corporations have these choices available to them? If not, why not?

If the reason is ethical than why would we support sweatshop labor, or any other exploitative labor?

What exploited people need is not sweatshop jobs but access to capital and education. Invest in them, do not exploit them.

Child labor is much the same - a society can only ban it when it can afford to do so. An agrarian society has inevirably plenty of child labor, as part of the family. That said, you can probably ban companies from ever employing children, especially with the productivity level of current mass-production tech.

Investment in people is a red herring. You can give people choice and invest in them. Though guess what: developing countries (which is who we're talking about) don't have money to do the latter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com