Sweatshops: A Way Out of Poverty - Benjamin Powell - Mises Daily

Sweatshops: A Way Out of Poverty - Benjamin Powell - Mises Daily: "I found 83 cases of supposedly exploitative sweatshop wages reported in popular press sources and compared those earnings to the living standards in the countries where they were found. In every country where the sweatshops were located, more than 10 percent of the population lived on less than $2 per day. In more than half of the countries, more than 40 percent did. Yet, in 77 of the 83 cases, the sweatshop wages exceeded the $2 a day threshold. Five of the six exceptions occurred in Bangladesh, where the workers earned more than $1.25 per day — something that more than half the population of that country failed to achieve at the time."



"sweatshop earnings even compared favorably to the average incomes in the countries where they were located. In six of the 17 countries, the average reported sweatshop wage exceeded the average income in the country — in Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua it was more than twice the national average. In another six countries, the average reported sweatshop wages were around the national average. In four of the five countries where sweatshop wages were 50 percent below the national average, the workers were immigrants (sometimes illegal) from other countries and their sweatshop wages exceeded the average wage in their native country.



In short, sweatshops provide the least-bad option for the workers who work in them."



"That process of development took roughly 150 years in Great Britain, because much of the capital had to be created anew and the technology invented. The United States transformed from a pre-industrial society to a post-sweatshop society more rapidly, because it imported technology and capital from Great Britain.



In 1950, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea were just beginning the process of development with sweatshops. In about a generation and a half, they catapulted from pre-industrial levels of development to first world living standards."



"In countries with average incomes above $12,000, there is virtually no child labor. But for countries whose incomes are below $2,000, more than 30 percent of children work.



As families escape poverty, they remove their children from the labor force. Child labor laws go unenforced or force children to work in informal sectors when they are passed prior to achieving a level of development that would have removed children from the labor force anyway."

No Obamacare Slogan Is Going to Save Dems | Cato Institute

No Obamacare Slogan Is Going to Save Dems | Cato Institute: "Now there’s a slogan for Democrats to run on: “We’re spending $41 billion of your money this year and we’ve insured as many people as we’ve uninsured.”"

Libertarianism 101 | Cato Institute

Libertarianism 101 | Cato Institute: "Exclusive licenses to privileged rivals nurture monopolies at public expense. Targeted tax benefits, subsidies, guarantees, and loans; or tariffs and quotas to protect domestic companies from foreign imports, spawn the same anti-competitive environment that antitrust laws are meant to foreclose. Corporations exploit the law — consorting with members of Congress, their staffers, and the best lobbying firms that money can buy. Too often, that’s the practical consequence of government intervention."

Bureaucrats a Bad Rx for Care | Cato Institute

Bureaucrats a Bad Rx for Care | Cato Institute: "The regulators believed that such standardization would lead to more accurate processing of Medicare claims.

Instead it made doctors and hospitals wedge their patients and services into predetermined, ill-fitting categories."



"CMS instituted protocols based on statistically generalized — rather than individualized — outcomes in large population groups.



It is easy to standardize treatment protocols. It is impossible to standardize individual patients."

The Ingrained Intolerance of Liberal Tolerance | Cato Institute

The Ingrained Intolerance of Liberal Tolerance | Cato Institute: "Indeed, why would a gay couple want, say, a Christian opposed to gay marriage to photograph their wedding or prepare their cake? It hardly seems the best way to ensure a satisfactory job. One suspects that it is an exercise in humiliation, an attempt to force those with unfashionable scruples to affirm what they reject. It is, in short, a calculated effort at intolerance."



"The objective was to force Catholics, mostly, and the few fundamentalist Protestants who hold similar theological views, to pay for what they oppose. In fact, there is no better way to humiliate those you hate. It is pure and unadulterated intolerance, the ultimate Washington triumph: Make those you despise pay for what they despise."



"Nevertheless, some decisions are more uncomfortable than others. Most photographers probably don’t care about the person’s background when taking their portrait. Covering a wedding — actively participating in and celebrating the ceremony — is different. As a writer, I have ghosted articles for people of varying political views. But there are boundaries that I would not transgress."

In Fighting the 'Job Lock,' Democrats Opened a Poverty Trap | Cato Institute

In Fighting the 'Job Lock,' Democrats Opened a Poverty Trap | Cato Institute: "“the phase-out effectively raises people’s marginal tax rates (the tax rates applying to their last dollar of income), thus discouraging work.”

In fact, for those low-wage workers who fall into this phase-out range, CBO estimates that it will increase their marginal tax rate by an average of 12 percentage points. As CBO points out, “[f]or those workers, the loss of subsidies upon returning to a job with health insurance is an implicit tax on working.”"



"While there is no easy answer to the poverty trap, we should recognize that every time we raise taxes, and every time we set up a new welfare program, we help trap people deeper into poverty. We may make that poverty a bit more comfortable, but we make it harder for them to get out."

The Responsibility to Resist Fiscally Irresponsible Politicians | Cato Institute

The Responsibility to Resist Fiscally Irresponsible Politicians | Cato Institute: "It is important for citizens to recognize that resources are always scarce, and the function of government should be to prevent hell on earth, rather than try to establish heaven. When the state tries to do too many things, it inevitably brings excessive complexity in its actions and becomes inefficient."



"Good fiscal policy exists when the private sector grows faster than the public sector, while fiscal ruin is inevitable if government spending grows faster than the productive part of the economy."

Europeans Watch Ukraine and Fear Russia: They Should Take over NATO And Europe's Defense | Cato Institute

Europeans Watch Ukraine and Fear Russia: They Should Take over NATO And Europe's Defense | Cato Institute: "Ukraine long has been divided along ethnic, cultural, and linguistic lines, with pro-Russian sentiment increasing the further one goes to the east. It is highest in Crimea. In fact, that region only ended up in Ukraine in 1954 when then Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Nikita Krushchev, from Ukraine, shifted it administratively."



"Independence from the Soviet Union is fine. Independence from Ukraine is not. Everyone believes in self-determination, except when they don’t."



"The best answer for the Crimean crisis is a negotiated climb-down, where Russia pulls back its forces, Kiev addresses those disenfranchised by Yanukovich’s ouster, Crimea delays its referendum, Ukraine accepts a secession vote, Europe respects the result, Washington stops meddling in Kiev’s politics, and everyone disavows any intention of bringing Ukraine into NATO. Kiev would not be pressed to choose between east and west, but could look to both economically.  Moscow would accept expanded European economic ties without allied defense commitments to its southern neighbor and the U.S. would eschew playing a new Great Game against Russia along its border."

Governing for Poetry | Cato Institute

Governing for Poetry | Cato Institute: "When government welfare spending increases, private charitable giving tends to decline. Conversely, when welfare programs are cut — or perceived to be cut — Americans step up and increase their charitable giving. As Murray explains, “if government is not seen as a legitimate source of intervention, individuals and associations will respond. If instead government is permitted to respond, government will seize the opportunity, expand on it, and eventually take over altogether.”"



"In the absence of widespread government enforced discrimination, such as existed in the Jim Crow South, there would seem to be numerous non-governmental tools — boycotts, public shaming, etc. — available to punish bigoted business owners. Sometimes the correct answer is not “there ought to be a law.”"



"No less than liberals, too many conservatives believe that virtue can and sometimes must be compelled by the state.



All of this bespeaks a lack of faith in one’s own convictions and moral authority. When George Washington contrasted government to civil society in his farewell address, warning that “government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force,” he was making an important distinction. Government relies on force and coercion to achieve its objectives. In contrast, the civil society relies on persuasion — reason and eloquence (and, yes, sometimes poetry) — to motivate people."

Choosing to Learn | Cato Institute

Choosing to Learn | Cato Institute: "The compelled conformity fostered by centralized standards and tests stifles the very diversity that gives consumer choice its value.

Most low- and middle-income families today have no viable alternative to their zoned public school. Absent any alternatives, the school is not directly accountable to them, so policymakers try to approximate real accountability through one-size-fits-all regulations.

But distant bureaucrats cannot know the individual needs and preferences of every family. Nor do they share the local knowledge enjoyed by educators."



"A global review of the scientific research comparing different types of education systems reveals that the most market-like, least regulated systems consistently outperform more centralized and regulated ones — by a ratio of 15 statistically significant findings to one, across seven different measures of educational outcomes."