We grow up learning that some things are just bad: child labor, ticket scalping, price gouging, kidney selling, blackmail, etc. But maybe they're not.
What I love about economics is that it can show that what seems harmful is actually good for society. It illuminates what common sense overlooks.
This was the subject of my Fox Business show last week. It was inspired by the eye-opening book Defending the Undefendable by economist Walter Block.
Most people call child labor an unmitigated evil. But my guests, David Boaz of the Cato Institute and Nick Gillespie of Reason.tv, said that's wrong.
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"If we say that the United States should abolish child labor in very poor countries," Boaz said, "then what will happen to these children? ... They're not suddenly going to go to the country day school. ... They may be out selling their bodies on the street. That is not an improvement over working in a t-shirt factory."
In fact, studies show that in at least one country where child labor was suddenly banned, prostitution increased. Good economics teaches that as poor countries get richer and freer, capital investment raises the productivity of labor and child labor diminishes. There's no shortcut through government prohibition"”unless you like starvation and child prostitution.
What about price-gouging? State laws attempt to prevent people from charging "unconscionable" prices during emergencies.
"If I'm in the neighborhood of Hurricane Katrina," Boaz said, "what I want is water and ice and generators. ... If you are in Kentucky (and) you've got 10 generators in your store, are you getting up at 4 a.m. to drive all day to get to Louisiana to sell these generators if you can only sell them for the same price you can sell them for in Kentucky? No, you're going to go down because ... you can sell them for more."
Also, if prices rise during an emergency, that's a signal for people to buy only what they most need. That leaves more for everyone else. If the price remains low, an incentive to conserve is lost.
Ticket scalpers are seen as sleazy guys who cheat you by marking up the price of tickets. Profits go to middlemen instead of the performers. What good could they possibly do?
"I like to think of ticket scalpers as the guy who stands in line so that I don't have to," Gillespie said.
Time spent in line is part of the ticket cost. Scalpers let you pay entirely in money, rather than partly in valuable time.
Most people say that selling body parts is wrong.
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Trolls in 3...2...1
Most people are taught that slavery is wrong. Luckily, Libertarians have set us straight.
Block, along with Robert Nozick, is one of the leading libertarian defenders of voluntary slave contracts, arguing that a slave contract is "a bona fide contract where consideration crosses hands; when it is abrogated, theft occurs". He critiques other libertarians who oppose voluntary slavery as being inconsistent with their shared principles. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Block#Slave_contracts
BDSM Economics. WHIP (and chain) Inflation Now! www.fetishculture.com/slavecontractmain.html
Oh, and don't forget the children. To hell with all that it's for the children liberal crap.
In short, we must face the fact that the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children.
~Mises Daily by Murray N. Rothbard
BDSM.
Good quotes. As far as I know they aren't taken out of context bullshit quotes. I'm too lazy to to actually go read .... but they seem good enough.
I disagree with Block on his slavery contract ideas , and I disagree with Murray on pretty much his whole take on the ethics of the child/parent relationship ..... he just wanted NAP to give full coverage, whereas I believe just the NAP is insufficient for figuring out what's right and wrong when it comes to children.
However, none of that really impacts the fact that outlawing child labor in a really poor country makes the children worse off, or that anti-gouging laws create shortages of important goods and services during times of disaster.
They are accurate quotes.
Furthermore, Walter Block specifically mentions, twice, sadistic BDSM practices upon slaves.
And slave-mom's children. Think about that for awhile. Real sick shit like that already goes on.
He'd like more than anything else to boss me around, and then whip me every time I displeased him. He values this opportunity way more than the medical costs necessary to save my child's life...Slave-master Rafe would never shell out the cold cash if, after he paid, I could haul him into court on assault and battery charges when he whipped me. Then, without this financial arrangement, I would have to witness the death of my child...
Voluntary Slave Contracts by Walter Block http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block134.html
Maybe a Stossel could even do an episode on a Libertarian entrepreneur's BDSM dungeon in a Children's Hospital who makes humiliation/torture movies of all the Hot MILFs who can't pay bills.
Free market, ya know, chains, whips, blood, and all.
Slave-master Rafe would never shell out the cold cash if, after he paid, I could haul him into court on assault and battery charges when he whipped me.
WOW! I mean WOW!
How in the hell does a contract nullify assault and battery charges against a fellow human being?
SWEET JESUS! What a BLOCKhead.
"Voluntary slavery" is a contradiction in terms. That's indentured servanthood.
Re: Sku,
I agree - the more accurate term would be voluntary servitude contract. But Walter Block did not want to use semantics to obfuscate the implication of a person agreeing to become a slave for payment of a debt. Also, Block is not saying he would agree to serve as a slave, only that as a mere academic exercise, voluntary servitude contracts are not anti-freedom in themselves.
Also, aren't things like Student Loans and Conscription a form of servitude, voluntary or not?
Of course student loans and conscription are types in the continuum of slavery. As is wage slavery.
That's what capitalism is all about - making people work for them under duress by disestablishing them from the land by privation property "rights."
Dr. Ralph Borsodi explains how private property is a deliberate form of duress to the landless, as follows:
Men do not do repetitive work as a matter of choice. They do it out of dire necessity. They can be driven to this sort of work only if they are deprived of access to the land. Our system of private property in land forces landless men to work for others; to work in factories, stores, and offices, whether they like it or not. wherever access to land is free, men work only to provide what they actually need or desire. Wherever the white man has come in contact with savage cultures this fact becomes apparent. There is for savages in their native state no such sharp distinction between "work" and "not working" as clocks and factory whistles have accustomed the white man to accept. They cannot be made to work regularly at repetitive tasks in which they have no direct interest except by some sort of duress. Disestablishment from land, like slavery, is a form of duress. The white man, where slavery cannot be practiced, has found that he must first disestablish the savages from their land before he can force them to work steadily for him. Once they are disestablished, they are in effect starved into working for him and into working as he directs. Only after he has made it impossible for them to support themselves as they desire, does be find it possible to drive them to work for him according to approved factory techniques, with sharp distinctions between the time devoted to productive labor and the time devoted to rest or play.
THIS UGLY CIVILIZATION by RALPH BORSODI NEW YORK: SIMON AND SCHUSTER 1 9 2 9
Re: White Imbecile,
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