In 1993, senator Tom Harkin proposed banning imports from countries that employed children in sweatshops. The outcome: Bangladesh laid off 50,000 children. What happened next, however, is the real crime:
According to the British charity Oxfam, many of these children were forced into prostitution. Thanks to Senator Harkin — who lives in the complete luxury that capitalism (and only capitalism) brings — the lives of these children were turned into a living hell from which they will not easily recover.
The fact is no one forces the Third-World poor to work in so-called sweatshops. They choose to do it — and gladly so — because it’s the best work around.
In an exhaustive study published in the spring issue of the Journal of Labor Research, Ben Powell and David Skarbek presented the results of their survey of sweatshops in eleven Third-World countries:
In nine of the eleven countries, sweatshop wages in foreign factories located there were higher than the average. In Honduras, where almost half the working population lives on $2/day, sweatshops pay $13.10/day. Sweatshop wages are more than double the national average in Cambodia, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras. The implication of this for all those naive college students (and faculty) who have been duped into becoming anti-sweatshop protesters is that they should support and encourage more direct foreign investment in the Third World if they are at all concerned about the economic well-being of the people there.
It is never the workers in countries like Honduras who protest the existence of a new factory there built by a Nike or a General Motors. The people there benefit as consumers as well as workers, since there are more (and cheaper) consumer goods manufactured and sold in their country (as well as in other parts of the world). Capital investment of this sort is infinitely superior to the alternative — foreign aid — which always empowers the governmental recipients of the “aid,” making things even worse for the private economies of “aid” recipients. Market-based capital investment is always far superior to politicized capital allocation. Moreover, if the foreign investment fails, the economic burden falls on the investors and stockholders, not the poor Third World country” (source).
There’s also this singular fact:
It isn’t fundamentally technological progress that the Third Word needs but the thing that precipitates technological progress: a culture of capitalism, without which the Third World will never dig its way out of poverty.
If you truly want to help the poor, therefore, cry for capitalism — cry for it to replace these Third-World socialist regimes and their autocratic dictators who keep their people in grinding poverty.