My tongue doesn’t hurt, the truth is an offense.

Sure, globalized market place, capitalism, limited government, free trade, etc. They are all good. Just don’t force these plans in the name of great economic progressive for the poor.

The lens one are looking through are fogged and presented the cockeyed notion, it’s one way are no other. Yes sir, great saviors of the poor. Perhaps, the poor needs saving from Western businesses imposing ways and not from their own lifestyle.

prettyskin, China has lifted millions of people out of the worst poverty on the planet in the past 30 years. It did not do it by rejecting trade. Ask any Chinese person. They did it by freeing their markets.The same goes for South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.

Where are the poorest people in the world? In countries with the highest degree of restrictions on the market and trade.

prettyskin,

Do you just have a strange fear of land masses on your west?

Freedom (which includes trade) and the market have great incentives to provide what people demand. This demand can include anything you can imagine. This means that people can demand a certain image of society. This means people can demand a certain fashion. etc… Freedom and the market process does not dictate how a society will develop, how art will manifest itself, or how scientific progress will happen. This means that every person lives their own lives, and has their own demands and values. Freedom in it’s essence has nothing to do with west or east, north or south. If China was free, it might not look like or develop anything like the U.S., but the demands of the people will be best served.

Don’t derail and arm wrestle my point with China facts.

Poor countries do not need Western businesses to survive, at all. Since Western interventions, look around, poverty still exist extensively in some places including the USA. Why don’t some good faith Western businesses try their hands at places like the Mississippi Delta area, impoverished areas of Alabama and not forget the vast Indian reservations. Broaden free trade at home. The West is in other people’s country because what they can do there they can’t do at home.

Delusional, Western thinking is the only good thinking, huh. The mind is powerful and can be fast set on the established way of doing and saying things. Dysfunctional arraignments (poor stricken neighborhoods throughout the continental United States). Yet these impostors of “free trade” with mythological USA history leading the charge of intelligentsia freeing all poor countries. What about your country, free your poor?

Stanley Pinchak, you are rather missing the point when you assert “However, the fisherman-owner in the previous example can not prevent a competitor from homesteading a nearby section of the sea and competing in the market for fish”. You are bringing out the physical world issues that get in the way of setting up a geographically based property system that can get to grips with fishing resources. It’s why, say, taxi drivers have property in their licences that they realise when they transfer them, but not in particular areas where they would have a monopoly. (I’m not agreeing with that kind of thing, just showing how it doesn’t work using a geographical split.)

There’s a bait and switch in ‘Nor as you concede can the fisherman-owner prevent a long time “native” competitor from selling his homesteaded area to an efficient competitor’. I never said “homesteaded area”, or indeed anything about homesteading, and I never said anything about “efficient” competitors. Since the actual gain from the whole thing is what underlies the question, stipulating “efficient” would be begging the question, a circular argument.

What I did concede was that, when there is a functioning property system in fishing resources that allows transfers – I suggested permits, but I never said anything about where the first ones would come from or how they would be set up – they can happen. It’s a tautology. But I didn’t cover the range of possibilities with that.

‘To extend rights to include arbitrary concepts like a “living wage,” or a “decent job,” is an affront on true property rights. There is no right to profit beyond property rights. To assert otherwise is to negate the purpose of entrepreneurial action.’ But that wasn’t where we were coming from, was it? I pointed out that without a property system in place, if outsiders could come in, there would be adverse consequences to the previous people because without property rights they would have no way to hold out for being bought out.

“As far as I can see, if [emphasis added] the foreign investor obtains the property, labor, and capital goods for the sweatshop in a manner consistent with the non aggression axiom and is responsive to pollution and any other property transgression torts, then his actions are conducive with the improvement of the economic welfare of all market participants. Furthermore, the sweatshop laborer has contributed to this welfare as well and to the extent that he decreases his time preference and saves, he increases the likelihood of a continual rise in real wages.” Now look at that emphasised “if”, and bear in mind the tricks French colonialists used in “peaceful penetration”; aggression includes more than (say) military action.

Newson suggests “it would be good to have more austrian-style analysis on the transitional stages from a tribal/communal property regime to that of individual title”. Why “Austrian”? That is, in what respect “Austrian”, and why not simply use other stuff as input, complementing the rest of your intellectual toolkit? It sounds like Stalin asking for Soviet physics rather than physics for the Soviets.

Eric says of my “It’s simpler and cheaper not to let the outsiders in in the first place”, “If that’s not using force, then I misunderstood you”.

Ah, but, the outsiders are outside. Unless they are let in, they can only come in by aggression. They may well choose not to start anything (no force at all), or Tonga – under its present arrangements – can resist.

“But I also should have read that in context with the locals having property rights over the waters. The other points you made, as to the harm, is then understood in that context. My Bad.”

No, I was presenting property rights as an awkward alternative to the present system, as a comparison. The “not letting in” is what makes the present system work without the awkwardness of running a fishing resource property system.

Fundamentalist writes “However, none of that changes the fact that so-called sweatshops improve the lives of the workers by paying higher wages than those same workers can get anywhere else in the country” – you shouldn’t have written that sentence without the qualifications you bring up later.

“All other things held constant, poor countries are better off with the ‘sweatshops’ than without them. That doesn’t mean that corporations don’t bribe state officials to grant them special privileges and commit crimes. And it doesn’t mean that every single instance of a Western corp setting up shop in a poor country has made the people better off. There are exceptions. When a fruit company bribes a state official to kick farmers off their land without compensation and then the official sells the land to the fruit company for a ridiculously low price, those farmers are worse off for the investment. But that has little to do with economics and everything to do with institutions.”

Well… it has everything to do with economics that covers real world cases and mechanisms by bringing them inside itself. And you can’t really do the economics separately and then adjust for those other things in an ad hoc way. Also – economically – the presence of sweat shops waiting to come in provides economic incentives for those abuses.

“Adding a few sweatshops will alleviate the suffering of a few to a small degree, but that’s all” – subject to what I just wrote, about creating incentives for others to cause harm.

Newson writes “the tongans who are happy with low wages are those who haven’t emigrated. we’ve got a colony of tongans and other pacific islanders (not to mention new zealanders) here in australia. greedy buggers, all looking for the big dollars.”

I think it would be more precise to say that they want money, but they don’t want (say) a Chinese path to riches. They put a premium on getting there the relaxed way, and may forego it entirely if there isn’t such a way.

Prettyskin writes “China… cast bronze before Westerners figured it out”. Rubbish. They may have cast iron first, almost certainly before modern Europe; even so, there is some evidence that the Greeks and Romans could but that the knowledge was lost along with the need in the Dark Ages. However, bronze and casting it go back to the ancient Near East.

Fundamentalist wrote “They have been free for a long time. The world standard for poverty is $2/day. That’s about $800/year. There aren’t any poor in the US by that standard. Minimum wage is $15,000/year here.”

Careful – that “world standard for poverty” is thoroughly misleading, as I pointed out earlier.

PM: “…that “world standard for poverty” is thoroughly misleading…”

It’s still the world standard for poverty.

prettyskin: “Your association is incorrect and misleading, comparing poor countries’ standard of living with the most wealthy and power country (America).”

So you want to apply a different standard to the US than you apply to the rest of the world? That’s very socialist of you.

In the 16th century, the vast majority of nations had very similar standards of living. All but a few in Africa have improved their standards of living dramatically since then. The West has done better. so an objective comparison of systems requires a single standard. Can you suggest another?

There is no way to establish a uniform poverty level globally. Therefore, cunning the massive with wrong dollar approach is just reckless.

Western businesses in poor countries are nothing more than political entrepreneur better known as lobbyist to poor countries’ government. Lobbyist always point out the cures, but never the ills.

Yes, Fundamentalist – and you should still be careful using that standard of poverty (or the standard of extreme poverty of $1 per day), just as you should be careful using GDP straight because it is a gross measure.