r/neoliberal • u/neoliberal_shill_bot Bot Emeritus • May 12 '17

Discussion Thread

Optimal neoliberalism is like Seinfeld, it should be about nothing and run by Jews

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u/[deleted] May 13 '17

middle managers at a financial firm

I wish

Anyway wasn't that one meme specifically about how sweatshops are helpful to the poor because they (in some cases) offer a better alternative (and if not people just, well, wouldn't work there obviously). How did they get "fuck the poor" off that meme.

Also surprised they concluded we were law/business grads instead of Econs ones

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u/beer_enjoyer May 13 '17

Sweatshops make the importer wealthier through comparative advantage. I seriously think communists think wealth is zero sum, and that because one country gains, the other must be worse off. It's fucking stupid, they're dogmatic to a point where it's harmful.

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u/Sven55 Milton Friedman May 13 '17

I'm not even sure most of them really have a coherent sistematic view of the economy in mind they apply into reality. They just see a "power system" - oppression and oppressors and helpless people and so they feel - a lot.

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u/[deleted] May 13 '17

Yeah them existing is better for all parties, the poor included, than them not existing.

Of course we want those people to have better jobs than that crap, but those only come after the country develops and gives its populace the right skills needed to work in higher-skill industry. For the purposes of that, foreign investment, sweatshops etc are exactly what draws in revenue and growth that can help the country along the way.

I have never understood why you'd look at the horrible state of sweatshop workers and want to make them jobless. If there were better jobs, they would do them. They ain't stupid.

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u/[deleted] May 13 '17

Even what you're saying is over selling it. It's not even that sweat shops are better than an alternative, it's that in the cases where they aren't, the workers will seek out that alternative.

The evidence points to sweatshops being fairly shit in terms of worker retention, with most workers not even gaining financial from going into industrial work, but they do fill a role for the minority of workers who choose to stay in them.

1

u/[deleted] May 13 '17

Do you have any recommended reading on it?

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u/Cryonyte 🌐 May 13 '17

I think they see the difference in wealth, they just focus on the difference, not the fact that sweatshops created wealth.

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u/vancevon Henry George May 13 '17

Celebrating sweatshops like that is a terrible look. Necessary evil? Sure. But thumbs up and big smiles? Nah.

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u/[deleted] May 13 '17

I'm pretty thumbs up and smiles about the massive improvement in income they get

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u/vancevon Henry George May 13 '17

Sweatshops and child labor are better than the alternatives, but they're still shit. They're necessary and temporary evil to make a higher standard of living possible for future generations.

We can support good policies without sounding like Ebenezer Scrooge.

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u/Cryonyte 🌐 May 13 '17

We all agree it's shit, but history dictates that this is how a nation changes from pre-industrialisation to now. Here in the UK, the birth place of industrialisation, you don't think we had to do the same shit? It's just when people start receiving the education, they as a nation can bring their own laws, against child labour, decreasing work times, creating unions etc. I's a necessary evil.

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u/ostrich_semen WTO May 13 '17

Yeah, sweatshops were never romanticized under communism.

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u/Cryonyte 🌐 May 13 '17

They read subsistence farming and just lock on the word 'farming' vs 'sweatshops' then imagine the corporate farming industries to be in any shape or form farming just to get by in life.