--- Warren Ockrassa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I believe that is an indefensible assertion. There
> is no evidence to
> support this conjecture; the people making mats
> might well instead be
> performing some other labor, at a factory perhaps
> instead of in their
> one-room hovels, that pays considerably more than
> the money-grubbing
> racket ever did.
>
> My postulate is just as feasible, just as likely as
> the worst-case
> speculation submitted by DeLong.
Certainly not. What factory do you think is available
to employ these people? If those jobs were around,
why on earth do you think that they would not be
working there already? They are working on mats
because that is the best option available for them.
This is so obvious as to verge on a tautology - people
take the best option available to them.
> That's similarly insupportable. Certainly making
> mats is not preferable
> to acquiring an education (there *are* public
> schools in India). This
> is another premise that DeLong wishes us to accept
> without
> consideration of plausible alternatives.
This is nothing more nor less than the imposition of
your values on people in an entirely different
context. When you're barely living on a subsistence
income, you _don't) have the option of acquiring an
education, because you're spending all day, every day
trying to feed yourself and your family.
>
> The problem is that the foregoing assertions, which
> are glossed over
> and buried in a way that makes it seem like they
> wish to be hidden,
> carry no weight, even though the entire crux of
> DeLong's argument is
> (in essence) that the desperately poor choose to
> remain so. ("If they
> didn't have doormats to make they'd be doing
> something worse/less
> productive.")
No, the problem is that Brad's exactly right, and
people like Seth Stevenson do more harm to the Third
World than the most predatory MNC that has ever
existed.
>
> There's subtle -ism at play here too, possibly
> racism or culturism: If
> our great corporations didn't magnanimously extend
> their
> ever-so-generous economic patronage, keeping the
> lowest economic rung
> occupied, why, who knows what mischief Those People
> might get up to?
Yeah, but it's your subtle -ism, not Brad's, that
would lead you to deny these people the option of the
best job that they can find.
> Perhaps manufacturing drugs (to sell to the wealthy)
> or engaging in
> petty cutpursery (perpetrated against wealthy
> tourists) -- in other
> words, we're keeping them economically suppressed
> for their own good
> (and to protect White Folks from Those People's
> idle, devil-occupied
> hands), because like the blacks were in the Southern
> US in the early
> 1800s, they's jus' too simple to knows any betta',
> boss.
Does this have anything to do with what Brad was
writing, or is it just gibberish? The companies
working in India aren't keeping people economically
suppressed, they're the only people doing much
effective to _help_ them.
>
> DeLong's argument sounds very suspiciously like some
> of those advanced
> to support slavery, but that's hardly surprising, as
> toiling day after
> day making mats for a corporation, with no hope
> whatsoever for
> advancement or escape, is, in essence, just that.
Nonsense. They can always quit, which is what makes
slavery different from a job. The reason they are in
that job is because it's better than what they were
doing before they took the work manufacturing mats.
> Used to be that liberals were bashed for wanting to
> "throw money at a
> problem" to make it go away. I'm unable to
> distinguish a difference
> here. Spend money buying fourth world goods and the
> problems in those
> countries will evaporate? Piffle.
Really? South Korea? Taiwan? China? The incredible
economic advancement that India is seeing? The
difference here should be obvious to anyone. Making
mats creates economic value and begins the creation of
an industry. "Throwing money at problems" that didn't
involve that sort of creation of an industry usually
did far more harm than good, because it distorted the
local economy in unsustainable ways.
>
> The problem with the "do something worse than..."
> argument is that it's
> totally hollow. If an exploitive, wealthy culture
> moves in and abuses
> the local economy for its massive gain (and minimal
> recompense is
> offered to the laborers), that culture has
> effectively become a
> monopoly -- on *work source*.
Do you have any idea of what life was like in India
even twenty years ago? How about 200? The grinding
poverty of rural India is something that most
Americans cannot even begin to imagine. It's no worse
now than it was 2000 years ago. The _difference_ is
that now, because of those exploitive wealthy cultures
you condemn, those people have the hope of something
better.
>
> If that massive, or even large-scale, work source
> were not available,
> other modes of employment, which might or might not
> be "better", would
> become available to the locals. (What did they do
> before old white cows
> in the states got a collective moistie for doormats?
> India's culture is
> about 20 times as old as America's -- 5000:250 years
> -- they had to be
> occupied during at least SOME of that time.)
Yes, they were. It's called subsistence farming. It
involves backbreaking labor from dawn to dusk every
day, without a break, with an average lifespan of 30
years and infant mortality rates in the 50% range.
There were also only about 200 million Indians, not a
billion of them. Where, exactly, do you think this
"better" source of work is going to come from? If it
was there, why wasn't it there already?
>
> This is significant in part because, even if wages
> were worse, the odds
> of the business being owned and operated entirely by
> the locals would
> be much better. Whatever capital was made would then
> be diverted
> entirely back into the community -- not a pittance
> skimmed from vast
> offshore coffers.
So you mean, they would be worse off ("even if wages
were worse") but no one else would be making any
profit. And you somehow think this is _better_?
>
> What's being carefully ignored by DeLong, though, is
> the inverse
> pyramid. That a vast amount of capital is acquired
> by relatively few.
> This is a significant problem. Every economy that
> has *ever* existed
> with wealth concentrated among only a very few has
> been fundamentally
> unequal, fundamentally undemocratic, and in the main
> feudal. DeLong is
> arguing in favor of a feudalistic social structure
> that is covered with
> a very thin veneer of democracy (at best; at worst
> he's arguing for an
> economic colony-state), and it's reprehensible.
This is economic gibberish. He's arguing for
something that does a lot of good for the people of
India today. As in right now. India _was_ a feudal
culture. It _isn't_ today, and that has lots to do
with western influence.
>
> Of course this is precisely the same kind of drivel
> one hears from
> wealthy people in the US as well. And as the divide
> between rich and
> poor becomes greater in our "jobless" economic
> "recovery", as the
> middle class -- which used to be the backbone of
> American society --
> continues to shrink, we're going to continue to see
> more dreck spewed
> from patsies such as DeLong as the US continues to
> more closely
> resemble the very third- and fourth-world countries
> it exploits for
> cheap labor now.
Well, if we listen to your economic advice, that's
probably true. Of course, those third world countries
would be plunged into starvation and anarchy, so we'd
still be _relatively_ better off.
>
> And as long as fools propagate this policy of usury,
> problems will
> continue to get worse, not better.
Well, true, but not in reference to the people you
meant.
Bob, you asked why I'm not joining you with the
non-crazy Democrats? This is why. Among many
reasons, this is a pretty good one.
=====
Gautam Mukunda
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Freedom is not free"
http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com
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