Exploitation: A Matter of Perspective

Matt Yglesias asked what was perhaps a rhetorical question at Slate on Friday, in his column The Real Story Is Everywhere In China Where They're Not Making Apple Stuff.

He first notes that "Public radio's popular This American Life episode about abuses in the Foxconn factories that make Apple products has been retracted on the grounds of the "significant fabrications" it apparently contained."

Matt then suggests that perhaps Apple's real sin was in "exposing our delicate western sensibilities to the misery [of Chinese workers]."

As he points out, "You don't read articles about working conditions in factories making socks destined for export to Kazakhstan, and you don't read articles about working conditions on the rice farms that people eagerly leave to go toil in the sock factory."

And then it's time for the rhetorical sucker punch. I use that term as a compliment, not a pejorative; it's an important question to ask.

When you read something bad about a Foxconn factory and then see that thousands of people line up for the chance of a job at one of them, that really ought to make you wonder. What were those guys doing the day before they decided to stand in line? How did that look?

Well, Matt, thanks to the New York Times, this Tireless Agorist can answer that question for you, through the eyes of a young man born in China and now attending an American university. He sent the following note to David Pogue, who included it in his column What Cameras Inside Foxconn Found.

If You Build It, They Will Come

If you drive a car, I'll tax the street, If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat, If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet.

Don't ask me what I want it for If you don't want to pay some more
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman

- The Beatles -
Seven-year-old Carter King likes to fish with his dad. He likes it so much that he and his dad built a fourteen-foot wooden boat in the garage together so they could go fishing more often. Being good citizens, (or knowing they'd get nabbed by the state if they didn't have a bunch of ugly letters and numbers painted on the side) they properly registered the boat, paying the appropriate fees.

Not long after, Mr. King began receiving letters from the Tennessee Department of Revenue, informing him that because he was a boat dealer and manufacturer, he owed an additional $539 in taxes on the boat.

Of course, Mr. King assumed it was a mistake, so he contacted the auditor assigned to his case. Nope, there was no mistake. The state knew the boat was built by Carter and his dad in their garage, for their own use. Indeed, the state doubled down, warning that the family could face injunctions or misdemeanor charges if they don't pay up.

The Department of Revenue isn't talking. Requests for interviews are rejected, not only for this particular case, but about the issue in general.

When you have the guns and cuffs, own the courts and hold the keys to the jail cells, why be reasonable about $539?

Mr. King, instead of focusing on the piddling $539, should be preparing his operation for an onslaught of other government agencies, now that he's been declared a boat dealer and manufacturer.

The Apolitical Economic Superpower

Christiane Amanpour of ABC News is the latest to grasp the significance of the world's off-the-books, untaxed, unregulated marketplace. This surprising economic superpower was featured in her Around the World segment on February 1^st.

This market is most often referred to by government spokesmen everywhere as the "black market," in the hopes that people will equate dodging the taxman and bureaucratic busybodies with slavery, child trafficing for pornography, murder for hire, heroin sales, and other, such unsavory pursuits. But people are waking up to the reality behind the hype. When a market is the second-largest in the world, topping 10 trillion dollars, second only to the United States $14.26 trillion, and currently provides approximately half the world's jobs, it becomes increasingly hard to conceive of it as fundamentally evil.¹

The future holds only increased respectibility, as estimates indicate that by 2020, 8 years away, fully two-thirds of the world's workforce will find themselves employed outside of officially-approved channels. This is occurring in an official world-wide economic slump where every new job is considered reason for celebration and pontification. It becomes ever more obvious that the biggest contributor to the growth of the global standard of living is not government programs, but avoiding government involvement in the economic realm to the greatest extent possible.

As Christiane puts it, "far from the canyons of Wall Street, far from the banking capitals of the world, the economy of the streets is booming." The same can hardly be said for the listless, if not moribund, state of the officially-recognized economies. Even in the United States, where avoiding political class meddling in the economy grows more difficult every day, $1.2 trillion, or about 8.3 percent of the economy, is off-the-books -- although the US is among those countries with the smallest percentage of such activity.

The Unseen in Economics - Part I

The underlying, and fatal, problem of political economics was explained in exquisite detail in 1848 by Frederic Bastiat, French economist, statesman and author, in his essay "What is seen and what is not seen in political economy." Politicians and their lap-dog economists have been pretending otherwise ever since. In this first of several posts about this seminal essay, we'll unearth the foundation of ever-shifting sand that underlies the entire concept of political economics.

EconStories.TV - Economic Edutainment

One nice thing about having a blog is the opportunity to pass on to my readers particularly worthwhile works by others. This Tireless Agorist would like to take the opportunity to promote EconStories.TV as a great resource for those interested in the basic differences between the Keynesian and Hayekian/Austrian schools of economic thought. Let me stress, right up front, that no matter what your impression based on this post, the two videos that are the focus of this column are must-see video entertainment experiences, even if you're not interested in learning economics. They're just plain fun to watch.

Russ Roberts, Professor of Economics at George Mason University (his blog) has teamed up with director and producer John Papola (his blog) to create a series of videos exploring those differences in an entertaining yet educational way.

Even if you have no real interest in economic theory, the short time you'll spend watching these two videos will serve you well whenever you're confronted by political or economic issues.

The Largest Libertarian Society in History

While the near-disaster of SOPA and PIPA is still fresh on everyone's mind, it strikes this Tireless Agorist as an ideal opportunity to discuss the largest libertarian society in history. The society that brought the SOPA and PIPA legislation to a halt and that brought you to read this essay. The society of the Internet.

As an agorist, and consequentially a libertarian, one of the things I find most interesting is the myopia among some of the most active members of the Internet society. These are the people who surf effortlessly through the web in pursuit of arcane information, seek out their own voluntary associations among like-minded peers, purchase products from all corners of the globe, and immediately and voluntarily band together to protect their communities from damage or destruction by trolls, spammers and other lowlifes when they sense that the peace is threatened. Such activities are almost second-nature in the more civilized corners of the Net.

Indeed, when these Netizens saw their freedom under attack by a territorial government with no real understanding of the miraculous society they inhabit, they almost immediately swarmed together in an officially uncoordinated but massive protest against the very government that claimed it was working to protect them. And they resoundingly won the battle, if not yet the war.

Yet the same people who defeated the government's attack through voluntary action express doubt about the efficacy, fairness, and capability of the free market and the core concepts of a libertarian society. Immersed daily in the largest, most anonymous, most libertarian society ever to exist, they fail to recognize it for the miracle that it is, or to recognize the compelling forces that make it work.

Defining the One Percent

The Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement both have some things right; but they also have some things wrong, at least when viewed from the perspective of this Tireless Agorist.

First let's find some common ground between the Tea Party and Occupy movements, as expressed in this diagram.



While Tea Partiers rail against big government, and Occupiers rail against big business, they both often fail to consider that area in the middle, that shows that big government and big business work together.

What this illustrates, above all, is that the One Percent is mostly successful at spinning a narrative to divide us. Tea Partiers recognize that big government gets in the way of the free market, over-regulating production, over-taxing the productive, and ignoring the limits placed on their behavior by reinterpreting the Constitution as they see fit. Occupiers recognize that big business has run amok, wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, and social programs created with good intentions regularly fail to meet their promised goals. Both groups recognize that taking from Main Street to bail out Wall Street has serious implications for the long-term health of our society.

What they both often fail to recognize is why these things are the way they are.