Nonsense Ideas There are some ideas and
feelings that sound plausible but given just a wee bit of thought can
be shown to border on lunacy. Let's examine a few.
Some U.S. companies have been accused of exploiting Third World
workers with poor working conditions and low wages. Say that a U.S.
company pays a Cambodian factory worker $3 a day. Do you think that
worker had a higher-paying alternative but stupidly chose a
lower-paying job instead? I'm betting the $3-a-day job was superior to
his next best alternative. Does offering a worker a wage higher than what he could earn
elsewhere make him worse off or better off? If you answered better off,
is the term exploitation an appropriate characterization for an act
that makes another better off? If pressure at home forces a U.S.
company to cease its Cambodian operations, would that worker be worse
off or better off?
It might be a convenient expression to say that the U.S. trades
with Japan, but is it literally true? Is it the U.S. Congress and
President George Bush who trade with the National Diet of Japan, the
Japanese legislature and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe? Or, is it U.S. and
Japanese private parties, as individuals and corporations, who trade
with one another? Let's break it down further. Which comes closer to the truth:
When I purchased my Lexus, did I deal with the U.S. Congress, the
Japanese Diet, George Bush and Shinzo Abe, or did I deal with Toyota
and its intermediaries? If we erroneously think of international trade
as occurring between the U.S. and Japanese governments, then all
Americans, as voters, have a say-so. But what is the basis of anyone
having a say-so when one American engages in peaceable, voluntary
exchange with another person, be they Japanese, Korean, British,
Chinese or another American?
How many times have we heard: If it will save just one life,
it's worth it? The "it" could be bike helmet laws, childproof medicine
bottles, or formaldehyde and asbestos safety regulations. A good
economist cringes hearing such statements because they only consider
the benefits of an action while ignoring the cost. Looking at benefits
only, just about anything is worth doing because there's usually a
benefit. Let's look at it.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration, some 43,443 people were killed on the nation's highways
in 2005. If Congress were to enact a 10 miles per hour national speed
limit, we'd save thousands of lives each year. You say, "Williams, that
would be stupid and impractical!" My response to you is: But look at
all the lives that would be saved. What you really mean by stupid and
impractical is that preventing thousands of highway fatalities is not
worth the cost and inconvenience that would result from having to poke
along at 10 miles per hour. Of course, calling a 10 miles per hour law
stupid and impractical is a more socially acceptable way of saying
those saved lives aren't worth it. How about academics and researchers seeing grinding Third
World poverty and chalking it up to a "vicious cycle of poverty"? This
vision of poverty sees people as too poor to save. That means they
can't create investment capital. Because they can't invest, they can't
develop, and that keeps them poor. In other words, people are poor
because they're poor. According to the "vicious cycle of poverty" vision, the only
escape is foreign aid. The only way this theory of Third World poverty
would have any credibility is if every country were poor. There's no
country that wasn't at some time poor, including our own. If poverty is
so vicious, how did today's rich countries escape it?
By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
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