Free or fair trade?

I am a bit of a (European) liberal guy, but when it comes to trade... fairness is more important than free trade

Free trade laws are mutually beneficial for both parties. The Chinese laborer who works in the factory making shoes sees that job as a godsend, for their alternative is likely starving to death on a farm. Even though their wages and working conditions are appalling by our standards, they are more or less typical of what we experienced during the industrial revolution, and an important part of a nations transitionary phase into a consumer society. Free trade laws and so called "sweat shops" have lifted millions out of poverty and are a great benefit to citizens in developed nations aswell. Simply put, we have access to cheaper consumer goods, therefore we have the ability to buy more of them, therefore our standard of living increases. The effects on employment are minimal, as the labor market evolves to suit the new economic conditions. The evolution phase might not be pretty, but in the long run it benefits everyone involved. That is of course if our education system can keep up with the changing, globalized world, something it is failing to do thus far.

The people you buy the coffee from benefit, but if the purchase of coffee was regulated in such a way that you were forced to buy it from these people, coffee would be more expensive to produce (because of higher wages and working conditions), therefore it would cost more and less would be produced. If less coffee is produced our society is harmed by having less coffee, and the third world nation is harmed because, while the people who do secure a job farming coffee are better off under a fair trade system, the overwhelming majority of people who can't be hired are stuck living in squalor as previous. Its simple economics. When a wage increases, less people are hired, and if the alternative to being hired is desperate poverty, then its better to have a large amount of people making a smaller wage than a small amount of people making a larger wage.

Going back to the sweat shop example, which I'm much more familiar with, if companies in China were forced to pay their workers higher wages, they would simply hire less of them, or lay workers off. Those workers would go back to their farms in rural China and live in extreme poverty. If we slapped a tariff on Chinese imports to, say "protect American labor", then fewer goods would be sold, fewer would be produced, and more workers would go back do their death farms.

I see a whole lot of buzzwords and not much else.

Then I await your brilliant refutation.

That would be most wonderful.

The ethics of free trade aside, it remains a bunch of idealistic nonsense. Breaking down tariffs and destroying regulatory commissions is all well and good if you get everyone to do it and keep doing it for eternity. Now even if we just accept the necessary expansion in the power of I-law and supernational institutions, there will still be those important few who have the means and motive to circumvent those policies. The US in the status quo irrationally champions free trade in a world that by and large does not want it. Not only that, but our lax trade policies have let China gain an unfair and politically unassailable edge. Protectionism is the proper response to this crisis and the default rational position of the state.

That's a highly mercantilist argument and is simply outdated. It is not in any nations best interests to close its borders off and restrict access to foriegn goods. We need to end the misconception that says one party has to be harmed in order for another to benefit. As I've stated above the dismantling of tariffs and other protectionist policies helps both the sweat shop worker and the first world consumer alike. This isn't the 19th century. This isn't Victoria II. These outdated concepts of diplomacy and international relations don't hold up in our interconnected world. China has certainly been cheating, they've been manipulating the system in a way that gives them unfair benefits, but China is also a powder keg waiting to explode. It cannot sustain its high economic growth forever and when its economy starts to lag its going to find itself all kinds of political problems.

Theres a very simple solution to this problem: Raise wages in the first world by reducing the theft aganist the worker in the form of surplus labor. Did you know if everyone at Amazon was paid equally they'd all have 1 million dollars a year in pay?

Also consider the fact that a good portion of fair trade coffee is produced by cooperatives, I don't think there so keen on laying off workers.

What service provided warrants such a large salary?

Programming(oddly enough, a great portion of what Amazon does) contributes alot.

So it's good because it can take advantage of people with crippling problems? Hell, many factories have to put up anti-suicide nets on their buildings just to keep the workers from killing themselves.

Why, then, is India also expanding so very quickly yet you don't hear about their 2 cent an hour workers? Copying an Industrial Revolutionary Model is outdated and puts your own people through unnecessary hardship.

Your right, instead of making peanut shells on a rice farm, they can make peanut shells in a sweat shop. Totally out of poverty there.
Haven't you ever heard of the working poor?

Yes, of course. Those ungrateful bastards should be thanking us that they get to make our T-Shirts.

Are material possessions really so valuable that people should starve so we get the newest HD, flat-screen TV?

I once again bring up how India is "industrializing" without spewing out a shit ton of CO2 and employing starving workers for their sweat shops. At least, not on the scale of a nation like China.

Wow. Just wow. The cognitive dissonence is stunning in this post. It really is.
You either support the people/workers' rights and fair working conditions and treatment or you don't. Pick a side.

I have no idea what your talking about. The entire post is talking about how you don't need to have poor working conditions and such to industrialize (which is what I took from HunttheCunt's post).

I was talking about this:

You have a hard time recognizing sarcasm.