On May 6, Dennis Prager interviewed Benjamin Powell, Professor of Business at Texas Tech University. His new book is Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy.
Benjamin: “I think conditions are as bad as most people say they are.”
“The goal is improving the welfare of the workers in these third-world countries. What are the means to get there? The means that anti-sweatshops activists have favored would make the lives of the workers worse.”
Dennis summarized conventional thinking: “We in the West are for an ideal and if the third world does not allow for that ideal, let them suffer the consequences.”
“We hurt the third world when we tell them they can’t use carbon-based energy. It just leaves them in poverty.”
People in the third world tend to have low IQs and when you tell them that they can’t sell their bodies for sex, you are condemning them to desperate poverty as they generally don’t have minds and circumstances that can be leveraged for big bucks.
Benjamin: “We’re saying that we won’t trade with them unless they live up to our standards for working conditions and wages. This [conventional] view [against sweatshops] mistakenly thinks that if we don’t trade with them, their lives will be better. Their poverty existed before globalized trade. When these workers choose to work at a sweatshop, they are demonstrating that this is their least bad option. We should be engaged in getting them more options.”
Rationally, these options include prostitution.
Dennis: “The question is if their lives are better because of sweatshops.”
Or prostitution. Or selling their organs. Or doing other things that white and asian people want but don’t want to do themselves.
Benjamin: “Sweatshops are part of the process that leads to better working conditions and better wages.”
According to a common Israeli saying: “African women are the best value for money.”
