Sweatshops, Child Labor, and the Global Economy

Should we be outraged by sweatshops and child labor?

Editors Note: The views presented in this piece are not representative of the views of Squared Politics, its editorial board, editors, or its contributors. They are the author’s, and the author’s alone. Squared Politics strives to be an open platform for debate and ideas. Fostering debate sometimes takes the form of publishing ideas that are not mainstream. We celebrate the diversity of thought, and the atmosphere of inclusion among our staff.

Introduction

In many developing economies, men, women, and children work long hours, as long as 18 hours a day, for a pittance of a wage, with one example being 55 cents an hour, and in many cases even lower than that, yet these conditions are not responsible for enmeshing workers in these economies in poverty, rather, they are the only mechanisms able to lift the impoverished worker out of poverty and into a better future.[1] While it is certainly true that conditions in a sweatshop are not enviable, one should at least put oneself in the shoes of an impoverished worker in a developing country and try to see what the real alternatives open to one are. The conditions of a sweatshop are, as mentioned, long hours and low pay, but associated with that are dangerous working conditions, which are often unsanitary and bereft of any safety measures that would be legally mandated by OSHA in the United States; this is actually more nebulous to define than it sounds, causing some headaches for researchers looking into sweatshops, since it requires a fair amount of judgement to see what is a sweatshop and what is just a factory.[2]

To us in the United States or other industrialized economies, the choice between a sweatshop and any other form of employment would not be much of a choice at all. We would choose nearly any other alternative without even a moment’s hesitation. That this is clear should be beyond debate, but in the spirit of debate, as evidence consider that there are not chronic labor shortages in the United States due to workers fleeing for the greener pastures of sweatshops in Bangladesh or El Salvador. To those in the United States, the choices for employment, while not always excellent or perfect, are miles better than the choices in developing nations, since even the lowest wage one could get is still $6.70 higher than the hourly wage prevailing for some factory workers in El Salvador. This is especially true for children since kids here are freed from the necessity of laboring and can instead engage in education, which enables them to have even better alternatives open to them down the line. For any parent, the choice between sending a child to school and sending a child to work will always end in a choice for education, assuming that the funds exist to send said child to school. Education is widely, and in many cases rightly, viewed as the most useful resource in human development, so it makes sense that the choice would be for the classroom instead of the factory floor. However, it is precisely this plethora of choices afore us that cause us to lose sight of the truth of the matter in nations where sweatshops exist.

Put starkly, the choices for those laboring in sweatshops and for those children stuck working are not between an office for 8 hours a day and a factory with no safety conditions for 18 hours a day or between school and a garment factory, but they are between work and starvation. It is not that parents in Bangladesh or India, El Salvador or Guatemala, wish to send their children to factories instead of to school, it is that if the children cannot be sent to work then the family may lose out on its ability to feed itself entirely, and it is certainly preferable to have children working but alive rather than picked over by vultures, victims of entirely avoidable starvation. The great material wealth in our nation and in other industrialized nations often precludes us from understanding this fundamental difference in rich and poor economies; that these conditions are deplorable relative to the ones we can expect does not make them deplorable relative to the conditions prevailing in developing markets, nor does it even make them deplorable even in an absolute sense. Sweatshops and child labor are the tools necessary for the poor to emerge from their penury.

Two Theories of Justification

Before delving into the empirical evidence that sweatshops and child labor lead to better lives for everyone involved in the process, let us first examine, briefly, some purely theoretical justifications for sweatshop labor that may help understand where economists and liberals in the classical tradition are coming from. The two theories that I would like to discuss are natural rights, and ex ante utility maximization, both from the perspective of the problem of government intervention and from the perspective of individual utility maximization. Although both parts of the second theory will occupy our empirical discussion, the first theory is still useful to mention if only to postulate about the morality of government action qua government action; it is by no means meant to be an entirely convincing argument in its own right.

Now, what is meant by natural rights? Natural rights, broadly understood, are the rights that are part and parcel of being human, available to all and forbidden to none.[3] Such rights are negative, that is, that they only ask that others do not undertake certain acts instead of forcing them to undertake certain acts in order to fulfill the rights of others, since this would infringe upon the natural rights that had been established. At their simplest, these rights are the right to life, liberty, and property. Whence do these rights come and wherefore should they be respected? The right to life is a right to self-ownership, and not a right to be kept alive per se; it forbids the taking of a life and slavery, but it does not, nor can it, mandate that resources be taken to keep one alive, as this would impinge upon the right to liberty and property of others.

Why do we have this right to self-ownership? As an answer, allow me to quote the economist Hans Hermann Hoppe, where he writes, “we can use another person’s body only indirectly, i.e., in using our directly appropriated and controlled own body first. Thus, direct appropriation temporally and logically precedes indirect appropriation; and accordingly, any non-consensual use of another person’s body is an unjust misappropriation of something already directly appropriated by someone else.”[4] What Hoppe means by this is that since we must first appropriate our own bodies in order to indirectly appropriate the bodies of someone else, this would be a violation of property rights, since they have already directly appropriated themselves, something we are unable to do. The only way for us to control the body of someone else is to use our body first, so there is no way to obtain direct ownership over another human being temporally.

From the right to self-ownership, we can see where property arises. If, as has been established, we own ourselves then if we are able to use this ownership of self to appropriate other items before others can appropriate them, then we can claim ownership of them, an ownership which is just and proper. If one is able to act upon an item before someone else, then there can arise no conflict of ownership for, temporally, all other claims occurred after the first one, when ownership was established. Again we turn to Hoppe for a more eloquently stated version of this same premise, “All just property, then, goes back directly or indirectly, through a chain of mutually beneficial — and thus likewise conflict-free — property-title transfers, to original appropriators and acts of original appropriation.”[5] The implication of this, then, is that all property obtained in such a manner belongs to its proper owner, and one’s decision to do with property as one sees fit would then also be just, so long as one uses the property in a way that does not infringe upon the rights of others. Furthermore, whatever one does with property obtained improperly would, by extension, be an improper act.[6] While this corollary is important for certain theories of natural rights as a whole, it ranges far afield from the conversation at hand, so I will opt not to dwell on it any further than has already been discussed.

What are the conclusions or implications of such a theory of natural rights? Broadly speaking, the conclusion is that whatever one does with justly obtained property, no matter how much moral indignation it may raise, is perfectly just provided that no rights have been abrogated. But let us not speak in such wide terms. The implications specific to the sweatshops would be that, provided that the sweatshop is created using justly obtained property, it is just for a sweatshop to exist, that the owner may set whatever conditions the owner desires and may pay whatever wage rates are desired, and perhaps more importantly, that the laborers have the right to sell their labor to which ever boss they wish for whatever wage rate they wish.[7] To continue in this line of argument, it would be unjust for a government to shut down sweatshops or deny children the ability to labor because it infringes upon the right of self-ownership of the workers and the right of property of the employers. It is however, nearly impossible to falsify such a theory of rights, so we shall let our discussion stand here for the nonce, as no empirics can strengthen or weaken the argument as pertains to the justice or injustice of property ownership.

Let us turn our attention, then, to the second theoretical justification for sweatshops and child labor, which is the pure logic of action, or praxeology.[8] Praxeology is predicated upon the action axiom, which states that human action is purposeful behavior, or the use of means to attain ends.[9] From the action axiom, we further explicate that man acts to alleviate some felt uneasiness about the future and that action is undertaken in order to secure some sort of profit, whether it be mental or monetary. Essentially, all men and women act to better their situation, to turn the version of the world that they live into the best available world to them. To reformulate this in a somewhat more complex way, human beings act so as to maximize utility ex ante, and in this way ex post utility tends towards being maximized as well.[10] It should be noted that social utility is only maximized provided interactions are voluntary; coercive actions against other actors will tend to decrease social utility through predation, and so we confine our discussion to the utility maximization of markets and voluntary interactions. However, government intervention changes one’s actions from what they would have been in the absence of the intervention so actors are prevented from maximizing utility ex ante. In this way, we can combine both theories to say that not only would it be unjust for governments to close sweatshops since they infringe upon the rights of workers and owners, but that they also prevent social utility from being maximized. Fortunately, unlike the first theory, this can be empirically tested and will be done so in the coming sections.

Let us turn now to the second part of this theory, which deals more closely with the idea of ex ante utility maximization. It has been laid out that human action is purposeful behavior, and that individuals act so as to improve their conditions and alleviate some felt uneasiness about future conditions. In this case we may analyze the actions of both workers and employers in this light, although our main focus will be upon the workers. Those who work in sweatshops are not there because they have been coerced and hauled off to sweatshops by jackbooted thugs, rather, they freely chose to work in these factories and under those conditions. While it can be argued that perhaps the children were forced by their parents to work, that gets into tricky questions of the rights of children that will not be answered here; even if the blame can be laid at the feet of the parents, preventing the companies from hiring does not address the root cause of this. Under this condition that the work is undertaken freely, we can say that those choosing to work in sweatshops are doing so to better their own conditions. As Benjamin Powell said in his interview with the Mises Institute, “a job such as Abigail’s [a sweatshop worker] made her better off than she was before, so long as violence wasn’t used to make her accept the employment.”[11] This lays the theoretical case for the justification of sweatshop labor. That is, that sweatshops have done more good than harm for the poorest among us, that child labor is a necessary, if regrettable part of economic development that should be allowed to phase out naturally rather than banned outright, and that government attempts to intervene in sweatshops and child labor has the opposite of its intended effect; it harms rather than benefits the poor. It is in this realm that empirics can guide us to approval or rejection of a theory, so now let us turn to empirics.

The Empirics of Sweatshops and Child Labor

What are the alternatives open to sweatshop workers and child laborers in developing countries? Outside of manufacturing, children in poor economies work in service and agriculture.[12] In this context, service does not mean being a waiter or sitting behind a desk, but it is instead a more dignified way of saying a domestic servant. By and large, education is not an open avenue for most children in these economies. The reason education is not available is not because parents there have not been enlightened as to the wonders of schooling, but because if families do not send their children to work then the entire family is at risk of starvation, since in many cases the labor of children provide as much as 20% of a family’s income, which was the difference between survival and penury.[13] The labor of children enables families to make a living and escape from near term destitution. While it is no doubt true that education is, long term, the best way to escape poverty, in the short term the choice is between labor and life, not labor and school; while neither option is great, it is better to go to work with calloused hands and a full stomach rather than go to school with a bag full of books and an empty stomach. The economies of these nations are not developed to the point where it is an option for children to go to school and learn rather than go to a factory and brave inhospitable conditions, but the labor of these children increases total productivity and helps to accumulate capital to the point where these children can go to school, and when it is financially possible for them to receive an education, they will. Already we are starting to see incidences of child labor decrease in developing economies, following in the path of developed nations.[14] In these factories, children are not just manufacturing shirts and shoes, but they are also building a better future for their families, themselves, and their future children, not to mention developing valuable skills that they would be unable to cultivate in a farm or as a domestic servant. Even if this labor is necessary, one might say, that does not mean that it represents an improvement in their condition. However, child labor in factories is actually the best opportunity open to them in the economies they live in. While this may sound like a bold claim, that a child laboring in a factory has the best situation out of all poor children in developing markets, it is one that can be empirically proved, as I will endeavor to show.

If children are not working in factories, then they will be working either as domestic servants or in agriculture, for the most part, but there also exists cases of children who could not work in factories working who instead worked as scavengers, picking over a garbage heap in order to get enough sustenance to survive.[15] In places like Phnom Penh and Manila, the destitute descend upon garbage heaps like vultures squabbling over the desecrated corpse of a marmot, barefooted children scrambling over great piles of refuse in search of plastics which they can sell for 5 cents a pound. Compared to this “Dante-like vision of hell”, a job in a factory would be a gift from heaven, a “gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children.”[16] While a job in a sweatshop is certainly not enjoyable, it does represent a way out of poverty compared to picking over steaming trash underneath the sweltering sun of Cambodia or the Philippines. Children are regularly run over by garbage trucks as they dart amongst the garbage; some of them even live in rickety shacks in the midst of this dump, so why should child labor be made illegal when doing so will put more children into dumps like those in Phnom Penh and Manila, exposing them to even more dangerous conditions and ever higher mortality rates? For those able to secure work in sweatshops, their living standards soared as productivity enabled them to use ever more capital for their labor. Pay working in the dumps can be as little as less than $1 a day, and those working amidst the refuse pine for the relief of a factory, with one girl saying, “It’s dirty, hot, and smelly here. A factory is better.”[17] Our own economic strength has blinded us to the realities of grinding poverty in developing economies, left us unable to see what true poverty looks like, since we are used to seeing poverty relative to America or the rest of the industrialized world, but the fact of the matter is that this horrendous poverty still exists for many and sweatshops are the most effective tool to lift people out from under the oppressive boot of destitution. Building manufacturing jobs would attract capital and allow productivity to flourish, which would initiate a slow, gradual rise in living standards in poor countries so that they may all enjoy higher standards of living.

Even if these children are not laboring underneath the sun combing over refuse, the work open to them outside of sweatshops is still less than stellar. Work in agriculture for the very poor does not mean riding tractors and singing country music with a mason jar full of whiskey. Work in agriculture for the very poor means subsistence agriculture where a bad harvest is the difference between living through winter and starving to death in the throes of famine. The pay is worse than the pay in factories and the conditions are no better.[18] Dying in a threshing accident replaces the problem of dying in a manufacturing accident. These are hardly enviable conditions, so why should children be forced from the factories and put on the farm, since “expanding exports of newly industrialized economies […] offer unprecedented opportunities to tens of millions in the third world. (The wages of those workers are shockingly low but nonetheless represent vast improvement on their previous, less visible rural poverty.)”[19] Perhaps one of the reasons why child labor in sweatshops is excoriated while child labor on farms is ignored is because it is much easier to see a child in a factory, since they are often at least somewhat close to urban centers, they are packed closely together, and, most importantly, they are making the goods that we all buy and enjoy on a daily basis. Children and their families flock from their farms and the trash heaps to the factories not because they have been tricked by evil industrialists but because the factories are the best alternative available to the very poor. Why, for example, “does the image of an Indonesian sewing sneakers for 60 cents an hour evoke so much more feeling than the image of another Indonesian earning the equivalent of 30 cents an hour trying to feed his family on a tiny plot of land — or of a Pilipino scavenging on a garbage heap?”[20] Part of this may be because we directly benefit from these sneakers, whereas we are not made better off by the farmer, and so we can tend to view ourselves as implicit in the poverty of these poor souls; the reverse, however, is true, since it is precisely our demand for cheap goods that allows the sweatshop worker to earn 60 cents as compared to the 30 cents he earns on the farm. Sweatshops, especially those employing children, are a common cause of ridicule. For example, John Oliver mocked Walmart for using sweatshop labor to make the clothes they sell, but as economist Don Boudreaux noted, “Do you not realize that putting an end to work would condemn most of those workers — adults and children — to even lower pay and even worse conditions?”[21] It is truly difficult to see the poverty of the rural countryside of Cambodia and Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines, but there is deep, crippling poverty there and so far the only cure has been to let markets operate and slowly but surely lift millions out of destitution and poverty.[22]

Just as there is a massive trash heap in Phnom Penh, so too was there one in Manila called the Smokey Mountain, a “symbol of third world poverty” where “several thousand men, women, and children lived.”[23] Squatters lived here and collected trash as the best alternative open to them, until the police shut down the site in an attempt for the government to save face. Poverty is not something that is new, rather, it is the default state of humanity, and so the conditions of the third world should not be looked at as the result of big business, but as the result of an inability for these poor economies to accumulate capital, something that big business is now helping them to do. In poor countries, as populations expanded, more and more people were driven to use more and more marginal land for subsistence or “homesteading on a mountain of garbage.”[24] Yet, when developing markets were finally able to break onto the world scene and attract capital to invest in factories, the lives of the poor began to benefit in very measurable ways. As industries arrive, they naturally must offer higher wages in order to attract people from old productive processes into new ones, otherwise no one will take the job if they do not believe they will be better off because of it. This increase in the demand for labor has the positive effect of pushing up labor in all sectors of the market as competition for now scarce labor becomes more competitive, and new industries are created to deal with exporting the newly produced goods. In this way, a country can leave poverty behind and join the ranks of emerging markets. And what has been the result of this process in practice? A wealthier, better fed populace. Caloric intake in Indonesia has increased since 1970 from less than 2,100 to more than 2,800 calories a day as of 1997. Moreover, while “a shocking one-third of young children are still malnourished — but in 1975, the fraction was more than half.”[25] What this means is that survival chances have now increased for those able to get factory jobs and those who benefited from increased globalization and manufacturing. If sweatshops were nothing but exploitation and a poverty trap, we clearly would not have expected this result. To see an example of this process as it nears something that might be termed completion, we can turn to China, whose wages in manufacturing went from $1,000 per annum 15 years ago to $6,500 per annum today.[26] As a point of fact, this process worked so well in China that they were able to go from making clothes and shoes to making electronics and other gadgets, showing that this process allows a poor country to climb the ladder to, if not wealth, at least some modicum of comfort. Of course, one could also look at the rising living standards in the United States and Great Britain as well, where the same process occurred over 200 years instead of over 40 or 20 years; we live in a world of instant gratification, but economic development takes time.

The most convincing evidence of the benefits of sweatshops comes from Benjamin Powell, whose book Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy offers deep contemporary research into the state of sweatshops in the economies of developing nations. His results reinforce what I have been arguing throughout this paper. What he found in his research was that not only were sweatshops better for those in poverty, they were often an enormous boon to the very poor. In his findings, every country where sweatshops were located had 10% of the population living off of less than $2 a day, while more than 40% lived under such conditions in half of the countries where sweatshops were utilized. As a contrast, 77 of the 83 cases of sweatshops paid more than $2 a day, and five of the six cases that did not occurred in Bangladesh, where they made over $1.25 a day, which was a better situation than more than half of the country was in.[27] What was most surprising about his results were that the wages paid in sweatshops “compared favorably” with wages in the countries they are located in; six out of 17 countries had wages higher than the national average, three of these had wages twice the national average, while in another six, wages were around the national average, and “In four of the five countries where sweatshop wages were 50 percent below the national average, the workers were immigrants (sometimes illegal) from other countries and their sweatshop wages exceeded the average wage in their native country.”[28] To also offer one more personal example, the families at one sweatshop could now afford “goats, schooling, and clothing for their families.”[29] This represents a clear increase in their standard of living over what it used to be before the sweatshop came along. Sweatshops are indeed excellent options for the poor, since it lets them work in better jobs than many of their fellow countrymen, a situation that should be lauded, not abhorred.

While all of this is true, one might ask, why are we also not working to encourage labor regulations in these countries and bans on child labor? The answer to that objection is that that would only serve to make us all worse off as a result, especially those who are deeply impoverished. Regulating the labor conditions of sweatshops in poor countries will increase the costs to these factories, causing them to either decrease the pay to laborers or to simply pack up their bags and move overseas where they can utilize more capital and thus employ better off workers in better off countries; part of the reason firms left developed nations to manufacture goods in impoverished countries was because the costs of regulation and labor were too high. As Paul Krugman writes, “The only reason developing countries have been able to compete with those industries is their ability to offer employers cheap labor. Deny them that ability, and you might well deny them the prospect of continuing industrial growth, even reverse the growth that has been achieved. And since export-oriented growth, for all its injustice, has been a huge boon for the workers in those nations, anything that curtails that growth is very much against their interests. A policy of good jobs in principle, but no jobs in practice, might assuage our consciences, but it is no favor to its alleged beneficiaries.”[30] The growth of these countries has not been guaranteed at all, and what little growth they have could easily be reversed by a heavy handed regulatory apparatus.

As has happened in every economy from China to England in the Industrial Revolution, capital accumulation allowed wages to be bid up and thus raise wages for the great masses of destitute souls. Moreover, while it is true that workers in industrializing nations want better working conditions, the choice is not between good working conditions and bad working conditions, but between better working conditions and lower pay and worse working conditions and higher pay. We have to confine ourselves to the choices available to us in order to see what the best available option is. When Benjamin Powell conducted his research, he phrased his questions about working conditions in better language in order to more accurately capture the tradeoffs involved for workers in these factories. Instead of asking if they wanted shorter hours, more safety precautions, or anything of sort, since any worker would say yes, even those in affluent nations, he asked whether or not they would like certain increases in working conditions if it also meant lower take home pay, and, perhaps surprisingly, the workers said no to every single question if it meant a cut in pay; as an example, ask a professor if they would like a larger office, no doubt that they would say yes, and then ask them if they would like a larger office in exchange for a 10% pay cut, and see if their answer changes. And this was not a close majority either, for in the vast majority of cases, the no answer was around 90–80% of participants.[31] Workers in poor countries prefer to see what pay they have as take home pay and not be turned into other amenities. The reason that this is the question that has to be asked is because labor is a cost to employers, and while employers might not care about how that cost is incurred, although they do care about what the cost is, employees certainly do care how that cost is turned into earnings. It makes little difference to an employer if the cost of labor is 50% pay and 50% amenities, but to the worker, that ratio might favor amenities too highly, and so they would favor higher pay in return for harsher conditions. These are the true tradeoffs that apply to the poor in developing markets, and they have chosen to take higher pay instead of nicer conditions; both is not an option.

But what of child labor? Certainly we would not be worse off if children did not have to work, but what seems certain is not so. Children actually were made worse off when child labor was outright banned by statute rather than slowly becoming irrelevant as capital accumulation occurred. For a historical example, let us look at England. As Ayn Rand notes in her book Capitalism the Unknown Ideal, child labor laws in England did not decrease the incidences of child labor, rather, they made child labor more fatal as children were driven from work in urban factories into more squalid factories in the countryside, away from the watchful eye of regulators.[32] The attempt of regulators to improve the situations of poor children backfired, and laws meant to help instead only made children less safe. Put more bluntly, child labor laws failed in England. Another English example applies to the silk industry, where market mechanisms drove children into the schoolyard as it became less necessary for them to labor. For two decades before child labor laws in England, rates of child labor in the silk industry were declining, and they continued to decline up through 1890, despite the fact that many of the labor regulations on the book did not apply to the silk industry.[33] The child labor laws that were on the books failed to help children, while capital accumulation allowed those families who had accumulated enough wealth to free themselves of child labor on their own. The same exact situation happened in India when they implemented child labor laws in 1986, and the results were disastrous. The findings of one study were that:

“While bans against child labor are a common policy tool, there is very little empirical evidence validating their effectiveness. In this paper, we examine the consequences of India’s landmark legislation against child labor, the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986. Using data from employment surveys conducted before and after the ban, and using age restrictions that determined who the ban applied to, we show that child wages decrease and child labor increases after the ban. These results are consistent with a theoretical model building on the seminal work of Basu and Van (1998) and Basu (2005), where families use child labor to reach subsistence constraints and where child wages decrease in response to bans, leading poor families to utilize more child labor. The increase in child labor comes at the expense of reduced school enrollment. We also examine the effects of the ban at the household level. Using linked consumption and expenditure data, we find that along various margins of household expenditure, consumption, calorie intake and asset holdings, households are worse off after the ban.”[34]

The banning of child labor led to families becoming worse off as a result, since, although they still needed to feed their families, they could not send their children to what used to be well paying, for the situation, jobs, and instead had to send them further afield for lower pay to work longer hours. Banning the tools of the poor does nothing to palliate penury, instead it pushes the poor into worse and worse alternatives as they struggle to make ends meet. What this means is that instead of sending one child to the sweatshop and one child to the school, now both had to be sent to work since the income of one child could no longer adequately supplement the family’s needs.[35] Since illegal work pays less than legal work, more of it is needed to supplement the incomes of the poor, so more child labor is used instead of less.[36] I would surmise that the goal of child labor laws would be to reduce the incidences of child labor in an effort to improve the living conditions of the poor, to take them from factory floor to class room, but since the result has been the exact opposite, I would say that the laws have been abject failures. Child labor has improved these people’s lives, while child labor laws have made them worse off. The poor do not long to send their children to work, but they are compelled to do so by necessity. Child labor laws certainly have noble intentions, but noble intentions do not feed families, nor do they lift families out of poverty, only productivity and economic growth can do that. As Tim Worstall writes in Forbes, “Further, even if child labour were still illegal does anyone think that there wouldn’t be child labour if entire families were trying to survive on $2 a day? Quite, 8 year olds would be out there collecting returnable bottles and the like whatever the law said. And not for pocket money but so that the family might eat.”[37] We cannot wish away the problems of poverty with laws and regulations, no matter how fervently we wish that that might be so. Instead, we need to encourage real growth in these countries and understand that sweatshops and child labor enable these poverty stricken people not just to survive, but to thrive.

Footnotes:

[1] Benjamin Powell, “Sweatshops: A Way Out of Poverty,” Ludwig von Mises Institute, March 20, 2014, accessed September 7, 2016, https://mises.org/library/sweatshops-way-out-poverty.

[2] Powell, Benjamin. “Sweatshops.” Lecture, Mises University 2016, Auburn Alabama, July 26, 2016. And Sebastian Rothstein, “Developing Country? More Sweatshops!” ECSB Journal, December 11, 2015, accessed September 8, 2016, http://www.sbeconomic.com/single-post/2015/12/12/Developing-Country-More-Sweatshops-1.

[3] There is, however, some disagreement over when one enters fully into these rights. See: Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty.

[4] Hans Hermann Hoppe, “Ethics of Entrepreneurship and Profit,” September 2, 2016, accessed September 8, 2016, https://mises.org/blog/ethics-entrepreneurship-and-profit. For a more detailed look at the justification to the right of self-ownership and the concept of argumentation ethics, see Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property and Hoppe, A Theory of Capitalism and Socialism.

[5] Hoppe, “Ethics of Entrepreneurship and Profit.”

[6] Hoppe, “Ethics of Entrepreneurship and Profit.”

[7] The repetition of just appropriation is intentional. A factory where workers did not have a choice but to work there under penalty of law, such as the factories of the Soviet Union or North Korea, would be unjust factories even if their working conditions were excellent and their pay was lavish.

[8] Praxeology is defined as the science of human action and is the main methodological tool used by the Austrian school of economics. For a more detailed look at what praxeology is see: Mises, Human Action and Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science as well as Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State.

[9] Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market. (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), 1.

[10] Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, 879.

[11] Powell, “Sweatshops: A Way Out of Poverty.”

[12] Powell, “Sweatshops.” For a more complete look at Sweatshops in the global economy, see: Powell, Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy.

[13] Steven Horwitz, “We Didn’t Humanize Markets, Markets Humanized Us,” Foundation for Economic Education, September 8, 2016, accessed September 8, 2016, https://fee.org/articles/we-didnt-humanize-markets-markets-humanized-us/.

[14] Horwitz, “We Didn’t Humanize Markets, Markets Humanized Us.”

[15] Nicholas Kristof, “Where Sweatshops Are a Dream,” New York Times, January 14, 2009, accessed September 8, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/opinion/15kristof.html?_r=0.

[16] Kristof, “Where Sweatshops Are a Dream.”

[17] Kristof, “Where Sweatshops Are a Dream.”

[18] Powell, “Sweatshops.”

[19] Paul Krugman, “We Are Not the World,” New York Times, February 13, 1997, accessed September 8, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/13/opinion/we-are-not-the-world.html.

[20] Paul Krugman, “In Praise of Cheap Labor,” Slate, March 21, 1997, accessed September 8, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1997/03/in_praise_of_cheap_labor.html.

[21] Don Boudreaux, “Open Letter to John Oliver,” Café Hayek, April 27, 2015, accessed September 8, 2016, http://cafehayek.com/2015/04/open-letter-to-john-oliver.html.

[22] That this has been the case across the world should shine some amount of light on the industrialization debate in England as regards the enclosure movement, but this is not the time or the place to enter into that discussion.

[23] Krugman, “In Praise of Cheap Labor.”

[24] Krugman, “In Praise of Cheap Labor.”

[25] Krugman, “In Praise of Cheap Labor.”

[26] Tim Worstall, “John Oliver Really Needs to Understand Clothing Sweatshops and Wages,” Forbes, April 28, 2015, accessed September 8, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/04/28/john-oliver-really-needs-to-understand-clothing-sweatshops-and-wages/#4e6680654029.

[27] Powell, “Sweatshops.”

[28] Powell, “Sweatshops: A Way Out of Poverty.”

[29] Rothstein, “Developing Country? More Sweatshops!”

[30] Krugman, “In Praise of Cheap Labor.”

[31] Powell, “Sweatshops.”

[32] Ayn Rand et al., Capitalism the Unknown Ideal, (Signet, 1986).

[33] Horwitz, “We Didn’t Humanize Markets, Markets Humanized Us.”

[34] Prashant Bharadwaj, Leah Lakdawala, Nicholas Li, “Perverse Consequences of Well Intentioned Regulation: Evidence from India’s Child Labor Ban,” Social Science Research Network, accessed September 8, 2016.

[35] Tim Worstall, “To Defend Child Labor in Textile Sweatshops,” Forbes, April 30, 2015 accessed September 8, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/04/30/to-defend-child-labour-in-the-textiles-sweatshops/#7b967fe217f4.

[36] Tim Worstall, “Memo to the NYT: Banning Child Labor Increases the Amount of Child Labor,” Forbes, June 27, 2015 accessed September 8, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/06/27/memo-to-the-nyt-banning-child-labour-increases-the-amount-of-child-labour/2/#281f5ca56ff1

[37] Tim Worstall, “You Can’t Abolish Child Labor Just by Making It Illegal,” Forbes, August 5, 2012 accessed September 8, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/05/you-cant-abolish-child-labour-just-by-making-it-illegal/#5856ac3c6837.

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