Exactly this. As long as you can redefine “exploitation” to only mean forced slavery, then no one can be exploited and we can happily enjoy our race to the bottom.
Is there a way for you to define exploitation that does not involve helping someone better their life. If someone has no job and I give him one have I helped him or exploited him? If you say both then exploitation has no meaning.
Der Trihs is right on this one. There’s a continuum of compulsion to doing unpleasant work. Near one end of the spectrum is the gun-to-the-head scenario, but it’s not at the far end: the far end is physically using someone’s body to do something unpleasant (say, using your dinosaur friend as a battering ram to open a stuck vent). At the other end of the spectrum is finding someone satisfied with their life and offering them some sort of bonus if they’ll do something for you, but you’ll also give it to them if they don’t help you out.
Of course there’s going to be some level of compulsion involved in virtually any offer: if you have nothing to withhold, you have no leverage. The question isn’t whether compulsion is acceptable, it’s what level of compulsion is acceptable.
How does “exploited” have any meaning, then? I mean, let’s think of an incredibly exploitative scenario: I find bums and I offer them food if they’ll strip naked and fight each other in a filthy sewertank, while I gather friends around to jeer at them and videotape it for sale.
If the bums are hungry enough to agree to this deal, would you refuse to call it exploitative?
It doesn’t matter what I think, it matters what the bums think. If they want the food and don’t mind fighting who am I to tell them they are being exploited. Fighting is a sewertank is bad but starving to death is much worse.
If you offered Donald Trump my salary to do my job he would laugh you out of the building, does that mean I am being exploited?
Exploited does not have any real meaning in terms of ethics if it means that helping the poor out is worse morally than not helping the poor out.
You’re the one who’s annoyed that someone else’s definition means “exploited has no meaning.” How do you define exploitation such that it’s a meaningful word?
Also, you call to mind the George Carlin (?) routine about how you can’t say anything’s bad, because there’s always something worse: that bad thing could be happening, plus someone could be kicking you in the head. Yes, starving to death is worse than fighting in a sewer tank. You know what’s better than starving to death AND fighting in a sewer tank? Getting food without having to humiliate and injure yourself. Let’s remember that there are more options than terrible and death, and then if someone forces someone to choose between the two, maybe that’s what it means to exploit someone.
And yet, in the case of China and India (and, hell, the US historically), this isn’t what happens. In all of these cases, cheap labor and a shitty economy that relied on that cheap labor is where things started off…but instead of spiraling down, as you put it, the opposite is what actually is happening in terms of standards of living and rectification of social problems and personal misery. Obviously China and India have a long way to go yet, but far from your ‘self-feeding spiral’ downwards, their standards of living have improved. The US is basically at the top of our arc right now and has certainly flattened out, but consider where we were 100 years ago and where we are today and you can clearly see that the trend has been pretty explosively upward.
If that person is forcing the person to choose then that is bad. If someone gets arrested and thrown into prison and they have to choose between working in a sweatshop and starving that is exploitative and wrong because they created the situation where the person has no other options.
However if I come across someone I have never interacted with and that person is starving it would be great to give them food, it would be good to give them food in exchange for a job, and it would bad to ignore them and walk away. It would be even worse to ignore them and then criticize the person who gave them a job because the pay is not high enough. That is what most critics of exploitation are like, they do nothing to improve the lot of the poor except have the politically correct ideas and they criticize the people who are helping the poor because they are not doing enough.
This is an interesting topic, but it’s a common belief I have encountered with internet conservatives that no one can be exploited.
I’ve never had to have a job in the traditional sense just to avoid starvation and homelessness. That’s a pretty low bar, though probably a function of my first world environment to an extent. I’ve never found myself living a dump or living a factory working 80 hour weeks for 50 bucks a month, either. So I guess that’s easy for me to say.
We don’t need to agree on the semantics of “exploited” to discuss whether or not there should be a minimum wage. However, it winds up at the same place.
We either agree, as a public, to set a lower limit on wages to help avoid “working but starving”, or we don’t. The arguments pro and con are pretty well hashed out. The libertarian argument is a good one: let each person decide. But the progressive counterargument is the race to the bottom, and it’s a good argument too.
Marx predicted a revolution, caused by the race to the bottom (to oversimplify). He was wrong, and labor unions were one of the big reasons. Minimum wage laws provide another levy. I ask the libertarians, which is worse? Revolution? Unions? Minimum wage? IMHO, those are the options. Oh wait, there’s another option: a standing armed national guard, frequently deployed, or other means of quelling massive public unrest.
I think the “exploitation” is relying on someone else’s goodwill to survive. I don’t believe that tying a basic level of subsistence to the vagaries of employment is wise. We’re a rich country and should provide everyone with enough money to buy basic groceries and perhaps a half month’s rent in the cheapest apartments (along with health care). That way, even without a job, people can eat and, with a roommate or two, obtain shelter. Anything more than that, leisure activities, status or luxuries, can be competed for in the job or business market. But basic survival should be taken care of.
And I say we’re a rich country and can afford it, but in poorer countries, basic survival costs that much less. I’m not sure there’s an excuse for any country not to ensure basic levels of food and shelter to all its citizens.
The presumptions in these discussions are false.
In fact from the improvement in the trade flows and from the attraction of industry, most of the
emerging markets have become much richer and the standards of living have risen.
What I see behind the faux concern for the supposed exploitation of the labourers and always the talk of imposing standards is in fact a protectionism of their own priviledges disguised.
When you say we’re a rich country, who do you mean by we?
If you mean you and like minded individuals does that mean you are currently giving 15K a year so a stranger can eat and live with a roomate? If so I think your charity dollars would be better spent providing medicine or sustenance to poor children in a country where they would otherwise die rather than subsidize someone who won the genetic lottery by being born in the richest country in the world.
If you mean the government should take the money from people who do not want to give it and use that to subsidize strangers. I would ask what authority the government has to require people to work to support others who could work to support themselves but choose not to.
The authority granted it by its Leviathanic function: it’s the only legitimate owner of force in our society, and as such it uses violence to enforce property stultification, the idea of saying that whoever currently owns something gets to determine how it’s used until they voluntarily give it away.
That ain’t natural, that’s government at work.
We give that power to the government, because without it things get hinky. But if we give the government the power of property stultification, it only makes sense to give the government the power to redistribute that property when doing so is in our social best interest.
It’s in our social best interest not to have an impoverished underclass. So our government, which normally keeps that impoverished underclass from repossessing your frivolities, sometimes engages in that repossession itself, in order to alleviate the suffering of the underclass.
By “rich country” I mean a GDP of 14 trillion dollars.
And I support a lot of poor people on my meager ~45k salary. They are friends and family, but I would be happy to contribute to a pool that ensures no one has to starve, including, especially, strangers.
Well for one thing, that’s all the government does, or has ever done. They take money from people who would rather keep it, and use it to support strangers by building roads for them, fighting off enemies for them, educating them, and enacting laws and regulations to protect them.
I’m just advocating yet another function for them to perform with the taxes they collect, and one that I believe will make a lot of other government spending obsolete, such as welfare, SS, HUD, and a whole lot of associated bureaucracy. I’m not foolish enough to believe it would save money or be revenue neutral, but I don’t think it would be quite as expensive as you might think.
For another thing, my system wouldn’t be means tested. Everyone would be eligible, which means if you make a million dollars a year but spend it all on hookers and blow, when you lose your job you’ll still get your minimum government check and be protected from starving in a gutter. And maybe you’ll learn your lesson and get back to work, rather than drinking yourself to death in the street.
With health care and food covered, the friction of changing jobs is eliminated, people are free to take time off to learn new skills or start businesses. And in general I think the economy would be helped by more efficiently allocating labor. This is in addition to eliminating the desperation and crime associated with poverty. A bum on the street simply cannot get a job or contribute to the economy in any way. A person with a roof over their head and some food in their belly can.
Linus invented Linux because Finland allowed him to play around on the computer all day instead of getting a minimum wage job to pay the bills. Now Linux is poised to be (if not already) the most used OS kernel in the world. So you can’t tell me providing a minimum of support to keep citizens from starving is necessarily a drain on the economy. We could be encouraging the next Linus Torvalds.
For yet another thing, unemployment is pretty high right now. And underemployment is damn near universal. So you can’t tell me this is about “supporting others who could work to support themselves but choose not to”. Most people have no choice. This is about allowing people the freedom to take the job they are suited to and can perform well at instead of taking whatever minimum wage job comes around. Who do you think contributes more to our economy, computer programmers, who had the luxury of honing their craft without worrying about starving, or burger flippers who had to take that job to keep a roof over their heads?
hoboy.
Socialism is great, until you run out of other people’s money.
If you think we have an immigration problem NOW, just wait until we become a welfare society where everyone is guaranteed subsistence.
I wouldn’t want to work in a country where everyone gets to live and eat off of my productivity, just because they don’t have any hobbies that require money. Furthermore, I don’t think it would work very long. Too many people would opt for the lifestyle where they don’t want to work, putting a greater and greater burden on those who are productive.
I’m no fan of Ayn Rand, but believe she does make some good points. One of them is that an economy should be based on productivity, not need, because productivity is limited but need is infinite. Productivity is where wealth comes from. If you don’t reward it, it’ll disappear. “Rewarding” it by taking most of the fruits away and redistributing them to those who would rather loaf than work would cause a such a brain-drain that we’d need to keep productive people from moving out (just like Communism).
I talk about not wanting to subsidize those who are too lazy to work. I recognize that a lot of people would love to work but can’t find any work. However, in a system that feed those who don’t work regardless of the reason, that will generate a huge class of people who will become less and less fit for work. (Cultural evolution, not genetic.)
ON THE OTHER HAND, and hold onto your hat here because I’m about to do what sounds like a complete about face here …
I do suspect that eventually we’ll reach the point where the productivity required for maintaining a reasonable lifestyle won’t require much human labor, and won’t offer jobs for the majority of people. While I’m a staunch capitalist, I am only to the extent that it works, and in the above scenario, I worry that it fails. Maybe the subject for an IMHO thread. 
I suspect that in such a case, something like DrCube’s proposal might be the best system.
Well that noted socialist, Milton Friedman, proposed a very similar system.
The difference is that my version isn’t means tested and so eliminates that much more bureaucracy and room for cheating.
Frankly, I consider myself “libertarian-ish” and I can see why you would oppose it at first. But think about it: Nobody is telling you how to spend your money, like with food stamps. There is no regulatory agency to capture. It uses the government to provide for the basic welfare of its citizens and gets the hell out of the market otherwise.
I think something like this, coupled with deregulation (and better regulation) elsewhere, could be a win-win for libertarians and liberals alike. Poverty is terrible both for bleeding hearts and the cold, hard economy. And it’s within our power to make great strides towards ending it, while keeping people and markets free.
EDIT: Read this article, you’ll see we have a very similar system already. Let’s drop the dead weight of bureaucracy and keep everything above board and fair.
If you didn’t offer them the deal, they would continue to go hungry. So you would consider it less exploitative to let the bums starve?
That particular example is an obvious and egregious example of exploitation, because fighting (much less fighting in a sewer tank) has extremely dire risks to health and life. It’s kind of comical if you don’t consider it exploitation- it would be like a Nazi prison guard giving an inmate special privileges (or even freeing her) in exchange for sexual favors.