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Comment by gfaster | Hacker News Reader

I am personally convinced that the only way we can do globalization in a way that makes sense is enforcing labor rights overseas. If our $5 T-shirt can only exist with the exploitation of poor workers in Vietnam then I don't believe we deserve $5 T-shirts. The United States is in a somewhat unique position where we can uplift most of the world if we chose to just stop exploiting their poverty.

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Another way to fix it would be to allow the free transit of people. If an iPhone charger has more rights than the person who built it, we are in a very weird place.

How about a few people has most rights and others mostly none of? What if those rights correlate with amount of power and money? /whataboutizm

Realistically that basically calls for taking over the world as step one as it would be required to enforce demands upon others.

The "stop exploiting poverty" sophistic frankly doesn't map to reality. If the US pulled out of trade in Vietnam they would get worse off instead of better. The issue isn't the result of an action to be stopped which turns the entire notion into dross covered up with guilt tripping.

It is the same "leave the cookies on the table to gather dust while trying to eat far richer imaginary cakes" mental pattern as IP zealots who snub overseas direct sales with things like region locks because they think they could get more selling distribution rights months.

You would enforce it with tariffs.

So the poor in the US are not exploited?

The US would be hit hard. Labor laws and lack of universal healthcare would make it difficult to export to, say, the EU.

Regardless of what you think we deserve or what is right, those sweatshops in Vietnam are lifting the nation out of poverty, just as they lifted us out of poverty in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Sorry to reply to an old thread but I am just finishing "Planet of Slums" and one of my main takeaways is that neoliberal reforms in third-world countries are absolutely not helping (and in fact hurting) the vast majority of people in urban environments. It is our policies that are putting them in this situation and now it's our responsibility to help them out of it.

Of course this is partially a domestic policy thing, but how we view foreign labor now is not working.

Yes. Tariffs for all countries that have lower labor law and environmental standards.

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