Quick: Is economic exploitation good or bad?
May 9, 2006
If your economic education is influenced by what you hear from many pulpits, your knee-jerk answer to the question will likely be that exploitation is a bad thing.
Kruse Kronicle: When Exploitation is Mutually Beneficial
None of this is to downplay the fact that conditions of life in poor countries are positively awful compared to our own. The point is to emphasize that the surest way to bring these countries up to more tolerable standards of living is through free trade, the process by which the capitalist exploits the worker and the worker exploits the capitalist. To the extent that poverty still exists on our planet, it is due to insufficient exploitation. The only way to defeat absolute poverty is by greater productivity, and that means leaving people free to engage in mutually beneficial exploitation. More, and faster please.
OK, now let me ask the question again. You may not be quite ready to affirm that “more and faster” exploitation is an unalloyed Good Thing, but I submit that Kruse’s argument bears some thought.
The article reminds me of what I have been reading about the exploitation of Latino ball players by Major League Baseball. Is the deliberate cultivation of players in Latin America mere flexing of economic muscle by rapacious club owners, or is it mutually beneficial to player and owner alike? What do you think?
Dave, thinking that at least it is better for the fans.
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Yea! I get to comment. *grin*
There is the old adage that says that democracy is the worst political system…except for all the others. I sort of fell the same way about free markets. It is often assumed that the markets are evil so we most do something nobler, without considering that the reality may be that markets reflect evil but all the others reflect it even more. Thus, the ever present danger of being deluded into utopian schemes.
This article is playing with words here. Yes, in one sense we are using each other. But if the value of what I get (exploit) is greater than the value of what I give up (being exploited), for both parties, is it really exploitation?
I don’t think it makes any difference whether exploiter or exploitee “wins.” In either case it is not exploitation as commonly understood, especially by a lot of pastors. Not their fault; they, like most of us, are economic illiterates. Blame the educational system, I guess. Or original sin. Or something - I don’t care.