I’ll grant that sometimes they collude. I don’t know proportionally how much either way,

Neither do I. We both know that none of these things are quantifiable. You follow?

Well, even so, working in a sweatshop may still be the best choice available, because the state has limited the options available. You follow?

Until you can demonstrably read the minds of sweatshop workers, there is nothing of any merit to follow in what you just wrote and your libertarianism is vulgar.

Possible answer: Other statist and elite “maneuvers”, e.g., it’s very hard to secure property rights (see Hernando de Soto), government allowing absentee landowners to claim huge expanses of land appropriated eons ago (see, for example, Bill Bonner’s squatter problems in Argentina).

I have some trouble believing the taxing policies were more important.

People wanted to live around other people – hence the crowding – because it is around other people that opportunities present themselves. Going into the prairies wouldn’t have increased an immigrants’ likely opportunity set.

This is not to say that local taxes are not often bad. They are. They were. And I’m willing to be convinced otherwise. What natural experiment would Mr. Anthony like to engage in to test which causal factor was most in play, in our past or other countries’ present?

A historical sense is necessary as well as a sense of opportunity cost. People travel to where opportunities are. From foreign countries, often, and to cities that sometimes have sweatshops.

My ancestors moved to this country willingly. Why come here? Because there was a logging boom, and Finland went through a pretty tough period during the period of my ancestors’ migration. America had better opportunities. So, a bunch of Finns moved to the Pacific Northwest to engage in one of the most dangerous industries on the planet (my uncle died when a snag got him, a hill away from my father) – far more dangerous than most sweatshops – and they did so quite willingly and even enthusiastically. Work conditions in the old days weren’t very good. But these men from Ostrobothnian Finland loved their work. They made lives for themselves. When they could, they started their own businesses, even inventing new equipment.

As for me, I would never want to work in the woods. Never did. The work was hard, wet, grimy, often cold, and far riskier than working in a meat factory or a garment sweatshop. The hours were often quite long. But many in my family did work as loggers, and if anyone suggested they were “slaves” because of this law or that, or the working conditions in Finland, or in the mill towns, or what-have-you, they’d spit in your face – or at least want to . . . they were pretty gentlemanly, actually, for being loggers. (My grandfather hated the Wobblies, by the way. He thought they were borderline crazy.)

The condescension in Mr. Anthony’s unlearned, narrow-minded and shrill diatribe is not the only thing wrong with it. Stating baldly that libertarians who defend free labor are “vulgar” and “insane” is pretty damn extreme. Calling free laborers – people who could quit, mind you, and sometimes did, and moved to other occupations – “essentially” slaves is also calumny.

Some actual facts, careful research, and a whole lot better argumentation would be required before I went over to his side.

Sympathy for others’ plight is one thing. Bigoted dismissal of others’ choices and values and such is not required to be concerned over their well-being.

Lo and behold, to pay their taxes, the only jobs available are the ones set up by the government: sweat shops[.]

Ah! so government is responsible for the injustice, not necessarily the sweatshop owners and managers and multinational enterprises. I’ll grant that sometimes they collude. I don’t know proportionally how much either way, but I doubt there’s always corporatism involved as critics of sweatshops always seem to imply (when they bother to include government in the blame at all, that is).

Ironically, Kleen seemed to lay all the blame on businesses and none on government, so much so that I felt compelled to point out how he was overlooking the role of historical poverty and statist policies in creating the conditions for sweatshops to exist. So it’s odd that you seem to be calling me a vulgar libertarian and implying I overlook this.

The whole premise behind the vulgar-libertarian argument that sweatshops are the best choice available to those workers is insane and ignorant. As long as their local governments are taxing them and controlling the common land, there can not be any intelligent interpretation of the choices of employment manifested by the sweatshop workers.

Well, even so, working in a sweatshop may still be the best choice available, because the state has limited the options available. You follow?

I fail to see how pointing this out and arguing that prohibiting sweatshops will be a counterproductive and harmful “solution” makes one a vulgar libertarian. Prohibiting sweatshops will just deprive the poor of the best option available, leaving them with the next-best option available, which of course is not as good. I think some left-libertarians throw the term “vulgar libertarian” around too readily, with little understanding and as if it is an argument in itself.

If the statism of their local governments disappeared tomorrow, those workers may choose to go back to fishing, farming, hunting and gathering…

Maybe. Maybe not. But then they would have more options available than they did before and some of them may be better than working in a sweatshop.

You say that “most sweatshops are essentially slave labor” due to the three conditions you mention. Yet, it seems to me that governments the world over typically (indeed, paradigmatically) do all three of those things. Expropriating land and controlling its use? As governments do with property taxes, zoning regulations, etc. Taxing the population? As all governments do. Forcing people out of their pre-governmental way of life? Again, as all governments do.

So, do you take your argument to be implying that *all* labor in a statist society is “essentially slave labor”? If not, why not? If so, why do sweatshops draw particular ire?

The whole premise behind the vulgar-libertarian argument that sweatshops are the best choice available to those workers is insane and ignorant.
As long as their local governments are taxing them and controlling the common land, there can not be any intelligent interpretation of the choices of employment manifested by the sweatshop workers. If the statism of their local governments disappeared tomorrow, those workers may choose to go back to fishing, farming, hunting and gathering — such a preference can not be manifested through their actions because their hands are tied. Their first choice of living off the land has been stolen from them.