Quote from: edballs on December 09, 2011, 08:07 amanarcho47 - I agree with you about the role of government in all this, though your view is very US centric. The US government is a joke beyond belief, from the white house all the way down to the local town mayor. It doesn't matter which party is in power.But you seem somewhat naive about the realities of corporate business. Nobody is gonna have a problem with your tie dude making himself rich selling those glorious strips of silk (real, tangible goods) to a stream of happy customers.Bu if he starts up a sweatshop full of kids in a third world country to increase profits, then he is immoral.If he cuts his employees pay and benefits to increase profits, then he is also immoral."a July 11 edition of Eyes On The Market, a JP Morgan investor report, finds that S&P 500 corporate profit margins increased by about 1.3 percent from 2000 to 2007, with profit margins reaching levels not seen in decades.The JP Morgan analysis concludes that reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement in margins. Here is the report:http://www.investorvillage.com/uploads/44821/files/07-11-11_-_EOTM_-_Twilight_of_the_Gods__PWM_.pdfNow....the financial services industry.....there is very little in the way of real, tangible anything. People are making billions out of fresh air. Loaning out money that doesn't exist, and getting the general public to underwrite the risk. It's a scam.And that entire industry depends upon state violence. it uses legal entitlement to not disclose any current portfolio losses to depositors or shareholders, is legally allowed to treat demand deposits as time deposits, is legally allowed to literally create "money" from nothing via the magic of Fractional Reserve Banking, is cartelized in that nobody is allowed to compete with the USD as a market-based unit of account and exchange (lest they are labeled a domestic terrorist and jailed or killed), and of course depends upon the magic of the federal reserve, which again only exists and holds is legal monopoly on legal tender as the result of the state.not to mention the literally hundreds of thousands of pages that make it nearly impossible for an innovative competitor to come along and actually change the business or draw customers away. Banks have a very important role in the free market. They bring people with excess capital togethere with people who need capital, negotiate a safe means of loaning that capital and in turn the saver gets a yield on the excess of his personal production. They facilitate transfers across the world which would be impossible on a personal level, which bolsters the division of labor - a keystone to continued human progress.They are a force for good in a free market. In a fascist/corporatist nation-state they are the closest hand in the circle jerk with the state and its violence.As for MORALITY, it is NOT immoral to open a factory anywhere. If you own the property, you haven't stolen the resources to do it from anyone else, etc, you are 100% morally right to open your own factory. You, as the owner of a business and having full control of its assets and capital, have the right to OFFER any wage you want. Even .01/hour. If you offer too little, people aren't going to want to work for you, or the employees you do get are going to be the lowest quality imaginable. This is why wages go up in free markets - as labour becomes more specialized and capital makes it possible for a single man or woman to produce more, they get paid more. Think of it as the difference between 50 guys with shovels and one guy with a back-hoe - who is going to get paid way more?The problem with the absolute bullshit of this anti-"sweatshop" movement, is you are forgetting something incredible: The owners of these factories are not going out with police and soldiers in the morning and rounding up the workers at gunpoint. They are not holding the guy's daughter for ransom if he doesn't work. These people all show up of their own accord, knowing full well where they are working and how much they are getting paid to do it. It is a voluntary transaction. If you ACTUALLY research "sweat-shops" you will find that there are few alternatives to them in most of the countries that they exist, save back-breaking agrarian work like chopping and gathering wood all day or plowing fields by hand or mule. Also, funny enough, "Sweat shop" workers usually make about DOUBLE what most workers in those countries make. Their standards of living are actually increased and we here have the gall to call them evil. Same thing with child labour. Again, the moralists end up fucking things up ten times worse than they already are. Thailand is the best recent example of this. People heard about the 10 year olds sewing pants seams and such for 10 hours a day. They heard about it here, they got enraged because none of OUR kids work like that. They wanted it made illegal.What they forget is our history. In North America and Europe, the whole family worked every day up until about 100 years ago. For pretty much all of human history this was the case. Kids worked as soon as they were able, parents worked, etc. It was necessary, because it took an entire family to produce enough to maintain a passable standard of living (again, 95% poverty rate in 1900). But, because capital expansion and the market grows at an exponential rate (also effected by increases in population, which is also a good thing for standards of living), it was soon possible for ONE MAN to produce what it took an entire family to produce mere decades before. He could get a job in a factory and his labour produced enough to feed, clothe, and house he entire family - in fact, it became so excessive that average joe's could starting taking their family on vacations, enroll them in recreational activities and teach them hobbies. They could have time to study and learn about the world.Not so in Thailand. They are still young from a brutally oppressive state that choked the life out of the economy. It still takes a whole family of average people to keep alive a whole family of average people.But our cries from western civilization and the insane excess we take for granted were so loud, including threats of tarriffs and sanctions from nation-states that would severely cripple trade (actually crushing the living standards of the people there, but nobody here even considered that), that the government over there finally caved and put a minimum age cap of (if memory serves right) 12 years old to be able to work. Unfortunately, the ongoing myth that legislating a solution as opposed to letting humans collectively cooperate to overcome an obstacle is still a fantasy too many like to cling to. in the real world, these kids still needed food, and the work of the parents alone was not enough to ensure all of the basic necessities. Long story short: Child prostitution rates have skyrocketed over FOUR HUNDRED PERCENT since that legislation was passed. It is almost an epidemic at this point. Kids have to sell their bodies off just to have enough to eat, or they starve. This is what the idea of imposing artificial morality "gains" the world. The fantasy of legislated solutions, or progress by mandate, or state violence as solving ANYTHING other than defending against the initiated violence of another (this can be disputed as well, but I'll stick with minarchism for the sake of this conversation).This is one reason that I hate OWS. HATE OWS. They are the kind of people that inadvertantly put kids on the street prostituting themselves, or send people who had a hope of saving something for their future back to the field and tree-cutting. They are the ones that want to grind the gears of human progress to a halt for the sake of some amoralistic, esoteric, and sickening distortion of human existence called "social justice" and "fairness" (violence by subjectivity). OWS has done nothing but disgust me up to this point.Anarcho47