I think you’re assuming more guilt than is warranted.

Say Flakee Shoes makes well-made, relatively expensive shoes. They see that a new company, Blister ShoeCo, a maker of low-cost, shoddy shoes, is starting to outsell the Flakees in some areas, mostly because of price. Flakee can cut back on the quality of its materials, and make its own shoddy shoes, but other than that, can’t find a way to boost its sales back up.

Over the border is the backward, undeveloped country of Utopistan. Utopistanis are mostly subsistence farmers, barely eking out a living raising beetabegas, which is the only crop that will grow in their primarily-volcanic-dust soil. The Catholic missionaries got there eons ago, so now everyone has twelve kids, and subsistance beetabega farming just doesn’t keep twelve kids and a goat fed. A small group of lucky stiffs are working in a foreign-owned condom factory in the one town (”stiffs” maybe being an unfortunate word choice, I guess), making $3 per day, which makes them the local gentry. (You can tell who the rich kids are, since in this Catholic-influenced area, no one really understands what they’re making, and so the rich kids all wear condoms stretched over their heads as status symbols.)

So, Flakee builds a shoe factory there. It offers jobs to the locals, paying $3 per day, just like the condom people. The jobs are all instantly filled, and yet another small group of Utopites are doing better than they were before, and Flakee can still make well-made shoes, and then charge a low enough price to attract buyers for its shoes.

In this situation, the $3/day figure is an effective shocker for someone wanting to convince Americans that Flakee’s goal is unjust exploitation. But the Utopites don’t have to function in our market – thet $3/day buys them far more, in terms of goods and opportunities, than they could attain trying to sell beetabegas to the other beetabega farmers in the area. While they’re not, like, having orgasms about working all day any more than I am, the $3 they get in trade seems to them like a good trade, one they can’t match anywhere else.

Jeff, if that $3/day was as bad, as unjust, as unfair as you imply, no one would have taken the jobs – they’d simply keep hoeing their beetabegas. Presumably, the Utopitoans look at their income from beetabegging, compare it to what Flakee will pay them, and make a decision – exercising their own free will – to trade their time and labor for Flakee’s money. If I open a factory in Duluth, offering $3/day, I’d be doing the exact same thing Flakee did, in that it wouldn’t be evil, or exploitative, )although it would just be stupid.) The main difference would be that no one would work for me.

If there’s voluntary acceptance on both sides of the trade – the trade of a day’s work for $3 – then the person deciding to take the job has decided they would be better off by doing so. If the dictator of Utopistan were ordering his serfs to work in the factory, that would be different – but that’s not the situation. Flakee has brought $3/day to Utopistan that wasn’t there before, and the price Flakee gets for its shoes back home has no significance at all to the workers – their deal stays the same no matter how much Flakee makes on the shoes.

Also consider that, if I own a nice snowmobile in Alabama, and want to sell it in my front yard, I’ll need a comfy chair, as I’ll be sitting there for a long time. But, if I drive it to Canada, I can get lots more money for it, quickly. The Canadian buyer would be paying far more than the Alabama buyer would have – and, in your scenario, this is a gross injustice to the Canadian. I submit that it’s not unfair – it’s simply realistic appraisal of the market conditions in the two places. Demand for the snowmobile in Alabama is going to be low – they probably have as many there as they need already. Not so in Canada. Similarly, a job offered in Bloomingtonprairiejordantown, MN, where unemployment is 1% (mostly because of JoeJoeBob, who would really rather just stay home and fish) is going to have to pay high to find a taker, while a job offered in Colitis, Wisconsin, (which until last year taxed business income at 90% and so now has no jobs) can pay far less and still be attractive to someone. Is it unfair to choose to put your new factory in Colitis? Your thoughts above seem to indicate that you would call it that. I guess I wouldn’t.

(Wow. That was going to be two quick paragraphs. Amphetamines ARE our friend.)

People risk their lives in small boats to come here fer chrissakes. But we must have an orderly immigration system to limit the flow of immigrants or we’d have 2 billion people on our doorstep by the weekend.

We have a number of immigrants on this site. Ask them why they’re here and not back in their home country. And ask them if doing it legally and using the proper procedures was worth it.

Years ago I used to volunteer to help russian jewish immigrants make the transition to this country. (No wise cracks, Max) The culture shock these people went through from living in a totalitarian state where the government controlled the economy, to a free society, was a beautiful thing to witness. I remember the time I took one family of four (mother, father, two teens) into a grocery store for the first time. They were practically in tears as they picked up food items and virtually hugged them before putting them into their cart. Helping these people was an extremely moving experience for me.

You should volunteer for a similar program Jeff. It would change your whole outlook.

I’m no less guity than anyone else is. But I’m not the one saying you can work outside our borders to support our lifestyle, but you sure as hell can’t come in.

When we develop new wheat and rice and corn strains that survive and yield more, and better and cheaper pesticides and insecticides and fertilizers, we’ve historically shared the fruits of those investments with the world, in a decidedly non-zero-sum fashion.

In short (oops, too late), we’ve done very well for ourselves, and in the process have pulled much of the world up with us. To argue that moral guilt for our success obliges us to hold off on our lunch until everyone else in the world has had breakfast sounds nice, but I don’t owe any such duty to them.

1) There are not enough resources in the world for everyone to live our lifestyle
2) We live like we do because we were lucky enough to be born here. If maz had been born in Africa, I suspect his life would be a lot different
3) If those two points are true, then it is necessary that there are very poor people so we can be very rich.
4) Given that, how can we close off our borders? We’re simply living in the shit we created. People are knocking at our door because our way of life takes things from them.

Now, I’ll grant that some countries are simply in different stages of development. I’m not saying that everyone would have it made if we didn’t exist. I’m saying we don’t live in a vacuum. The lives of other people are strongly affected by the way we live. Closing borders denies this. Closing borders is ethically defenisble only if we have no need to go outside them and muck around with people.

I want to see Kobe try to pull that backhand follow-through slap bullshit on Ron Artest. BTW, Kobe’s #24 jersey is currently the NBA’s top seller…and his sex with that woman was consensual until, in basketball parlance, he tried to run the high-post backdoor.