"Free" Market Debt Slavery
The inevitable result of lazier faire economics!
BBC News Link:
Ashok says he has been weaving since he was nine. He sits working for 12 hours every day, seven days a week. He gets just one day off each month.
He is a bonded labourer, what is also known as a debt slave.
When Ashok's mother died, his father left home. The boy was abandoned with his grandmother. Desperate for money she took £12 ($25) from a loom owner and, in return, sold the boy's freedom.
Ashok is now bonded, forced to do this one job. He is not free to leave unless the debt is repaid. And he is paid just 15p (30 US cents) a day, so there is little hope he will ever do that.
Traded like a commodity
Ashok's boss, Muthu Pereumal, can sell the boy to another employer, trade him like a commodity.
4 comments:
Child labor is what America great! Nothing helps motivated our unwashed masses like seeing your little brother get sucked into a milling machine. If we didn't have that reminding our children what made it possible for them to have a PlayStation3 in every room of the house, they would be just a bunch of ungrateful brats.
The problem with these slave workers is that they don't have iPODs and PlayStations. Maybe we could get Bill Gates or Steve Jobs to donate some of these items and we could air-drop our the countries where this is happening.
You bleeding heart solcialist need to quit whining about this stuff. Next thing you'll be posting is the the millions of people living at sea level who will be drowned from the ice cap melt don't have swim fins.
The best thing that could happen to the American workers is for these people to hit be a global warming tsanami and carried out to see. Sure it would be sad for a couple of weeks, but once the teletons are over, American Idle will be back on and the liberals can continue to donate millions to their favorite socialist candidates.
Lou,
You are so right! Why are we so backwards in this country? Why don't we follow India's Free Market lead. Twelve is really rather late to send kids to work when they could start at 7 or 6. And why don't we respect property rights here in America. If parents choose to sell their kids into slavery, isn't that there right in a free society?
You Socialists just hate to see others profit from the misery of others. India has the right idea. I think they may have the market cornered when it comes to the suffering of the poor. We can learn a lot from their system.
Flea:
You are very insight. I could tell right away when you said "Lou, you are so right..." Here in the United States we have run into a situation where the child labor stuff doesn't work anymore. Forget about all those laws and regulations the grew out of the Progressive Era. Forget that we can send out the local militia to protect the capitalist by shooting families having a picnic near the Homestead Steel plant. The thing at Kent State might have ruined it for the use of the militia. The problem at Kent State was they were shooting middle class white kids. Remember the black kids they shot at that college down South? Me neither. I rest my case.
The trouble we have now is that today's children don't actually enter the labor pool till their mid 20s, when the parental standins fainly put the Birkenstocks down and demand that their step children seek employ at the local McDonald's -- even if they have to work Saturdays.
Because of this late release from the family nest, any attempt to bring back child labor would be doomed. We could have a lottery where all the names of unemployed children under the age of 30 are drawn out of the hat and their parental keepers are forced to go do the work the would normally be done by the children -- when children had enough ambition to actually join the labor pool.
If this were to happen, we would have to extend the public education system to grades pre-2 to 25. This would cover most of the children and allow them the free to enjoy iPods and PlayStations without the trauma of having to face the prospect of earning $5.15 a hour. Of course, such an expansion of the government education system would cause a severe lose of hair implants in the local hyper-fanatical, anti-community bloggers. Why they would be upset confuses me, because I think their Mommies pretty much earn the peanuts in their home. But then again, maybe the free-market spirit might soar in the free-market freeloaders and they could start a post government-education day care center where the failures from the pre3-25 system are enrolled. It could be like a tech school of bloggers. It's amazing what a guy can blog about when he's hopped up on Redlin, Kool-aid and peanut butter sandwiches.
If this isn't making any sense to you. Perhaps you net to up your dosage.
Lou,
Let's go back to the part where I said, "I agree". It's so great to have somebody agree with such a hairbrained idea that I just can't get over it. Now don't forget, we aren't talking McBurger jobs here. We're talking endentured slavery. That's true "Free" Market. You realize that with this type of incentification for procreation, we could meet the employmentization needs of America without allowing all those pesky immigratizers in to do the laborization. Selling your offspring into slavery makes perfect "Free" Market economization sense. Just ask any ecomizer over at the ontheborderline blog.
Got to go start preocreatizing some new members of the labor force. But first I'm getting hungry for some of that Peanut Butter. BTW,
I'm low on Redlin. We'll find more to agree on later, I'm sure.
Your Pal... Fleamarketeer
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