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Harry, thank you. Very
interesting stuff. People have done terrible things to kids. My
father was seven when he went to work full time in a textile mill in Poland
(probably ten to twelve hour shifts). They needed small boys to crawl into
machinery to make minor repairs and replace belts that had come off and thus
eliminate the expense of shutting machines down.
The point I was making in my
posting was not really about free trade, but about bargaining power in trade or
any kind of transaction. Where this is unequal, as it usually is, the
transaction inevitably moves to the advantage of the more powerful
bargainer. The kind of situation you describe in south Wales eventually
led to unionization and social legislation that moved labor/capital bargaining
power toward greater equality for a time. But I think that it's now moving
the other way again. As the Bill Moyers program I mentioned demonstrated,
there is a huge inequality in bargaining power when people in poor countries
make things for corporations in the rich world. And, in the rich world,
labor has moved into a position of greater insecurity, thereby losing bargaining
power.
There has been an increase in the
rate of GNP growth in the US recently, while at the same time large numbers of
people have lost their jobs. GNP growth is not based on increased
employment, but on increased productivity. The people who continue to be
employed are working harder and longer. They have to to keep their jobs,
at least for a time. The bargaining power of the employer vis a vis the
employee has increased. But even the employer's bargaining power is a bit
of a sham. Ordinarily, he would try to keep his labor force intact and
meet his costs by raising prices. That does not seem to be an option now
because people, worried about their jobs, or having lost them, are reluctant to
buy. It's a bit of a vicious circle.
Regards, Ed
Ed,
My grandson Jeremy's father is a conservative Republican - and much has rubbed off on Jeremy. During our recent month in Britain, I asked him the same question on many occasions. At Big Pit in Wales - an attraction that shows how the miners worked many years ago, we went down 300 m. and toured the passages where coal had been extracted. (Miners actually went down a lot deeper to the maze of tunnels that extended in every direction for many miles.) We heard how the 5 year old kids were employed (very full employment). There were doors placed at strategic intervals in the mine to act as a barrier in case there was an explosion, or fire. The job of the 5 year olds was to open the doors when they heard a tram coming. They were in pitch darkness so they couldn't see the door. So, they had a string tied to their wrists and attached to the door. When they heard the coal filled tram coming, they would pull the door open to let it through. The lights from the miners helmets would be the only light they would see. For the rest of their 12 hour shifts they suffered Stygian darkness, alone but for the rats. What was the question I asked Jeremy? "Do you see why people became communists?" He was quiet. Things got a bit better in the second half of the 19th century - the Free Trader era and the time of Pax Britannica. In fact, I remember one of the Truck Acts raised the minimum age for child workers from 10 to 11. Wow! Incidentally, a major action of one of the many Truck Acts was to force employers to pay their workers in money rather than in kind. The miners at Big Pit got some of their wages in scrip, which could only be used at the company store - where prices were 30% higher. Oh, well! So, anyway, the Free Traders raised the age of young workers from 6 to 11 - among other things. However, I'm kidding. The Science of Political Economy is a study of the Production and Distribution of Wealth. Free Trade and indeed the free market is the way to produce the biggest pie. Controlled economies feature shortages and high prices. Distribution of the pie is the problem. The free market ensures that the pie will be the biggest it can be. The point is, who gets the pie? Behind Big Pit and the other South Wales collieries that produced one third of all the coal in the world at that time were the noble landlords who owned South Wales While the five year olds were working the doors in the dark mine, Lord Abergavenny was collecting the Rent from the 12,000 acres of scrub land under which they sat in the dark. The Marquess of Abergavenny and the Marquess of Bute were the noble people who owned the coal lands in South Wales and quietly collected the Rent. Bute gave Cardiff Castle to the community (probably when it became to expensive to maintain). He also gave a piece of land to Cardiff for a City Hall (the guide at the castle thought this was so good of him). Actually, it was part of what was called at the time "the largest real estate deal in Europe". The industrial revolution in England was financed by the ill- gotten gains of the landowners. In Volume Three of Das Kapital, Marx pointed this out. He also said that surplus value inevitably disappeared into higher Rents. Volume Three is the one Marxists don't read. I don't know what happened to Abergavenny when his pits were played out. Bute did very well, selling an Aelbert Cuyp landscape to the National Gallery for £8 million in 1992. He also raised £10.7 million from an art auction in 1996. All built on those 5 year old children. I've mentioned this before, but in Pennsylvania unemployed miners found seams near the surface in their back yards. So, it became the thing for the miners to dig down and extract the coal. In the 30's they were taking out about $35 million a year - an appreciable amount in those times. When the land is monopolized as in Wales and Pennsylvania, the workers are rack-rented into poverty. This has nothing to do with Free Trade. It has everything to do with landlordism. And now in Britain what do we find after a century and a half? Some 70% of the country is still owned by just 1% of the people. It's as if people will never learn. Harry ----------------------------------------------------- Ed wrote: Cool it, Keith! I haven't been following the list closely for the past couple of days because I've been busy with other things, but on reading it just now, I found Ray's message interesting even if it was off your topic. And, incidentally, I watched a program on PBS last (Bill Moyer) that suggested that free trade led to many other things besides openess to new ideas, including the mass exploitation of the poor and desparate. <snip> **************************************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: (818) 352-4141 -- Fax: (818) 353-2242 http://home.comcast.net/~haledward ****************************************************
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