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Originally Posted by stonez138 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Wow, you cite The Charles Koch foundation, er, I mean the Cato Institute and Wikipedia. Talk about an epic fail. I can't imagine that the billionaire Koch brothers could possibly have an agenda to justify child labor...

Yes, and we all know about the Wikipedia sweat shops. As I said, I took the first link Google gave me. If you had actually done the work of typing about 30 keystrokes, you could have found dozens of articles on sites you approve of. In the modern day, facts are easily verifiable, so I don't care much what website I find them on.

Sorry, you don't get to define the topic I'm discussing. How is a woman getting paid less by an employer a discussion about workers screwing over there customers? That's the main discussion here, although we have gone on a few tangents.

You are the one who changed the subject to businesses screwing over their customers, and I was responding to that charge. Then you changed it back to businesses screwing over their employees. It seems like every time I destroy your pathetic attempts at rational thought with facts and logic, you just change the subject. If you don't want me to define the topic you're discussing, then stay on one topic and stop jumping around, grasping at whatever socialist talking point you can remember. Stay focused on the discussion.

Ok now I know you're just trolling. Either that or you have your head WAY FAR up your ass. Who debunked this? Let me guess, The Cato Institute? I guess someone forgot to let Cesar Chavez know this. Let's just take the example of phospherous matches, which were being made in this country into the 20th century. I guess it wasn't abuse or exploitation when these workers fingernails fell off or worse. Or I can speak from my personal experience. I worked briefly at a chicken farm. This farm advertised room and board with employment. This "room and board" was actually a bunch of broke down school busses parked behind the farm. Or how about something more recent like this story about a PREGNANT WOMAN that died after being denied water and shade.
the ultimate irony is that the link is from, you're going to love this, FOX NEWS!!!! http://www.foxnews.com/story/0%2C293...3458%2C00.html No exploitation going on there huh?

You list some specific instances where exploitation may have taken place, but I was addressing the general principle laid out by Marx that stated that all profits were the result of exploitation of labor. This has been refuted by pretty much every modern school of economic thought, ranging from the Austrians (most pro-free market) to the Keynesians (very pro managed market). Even the 20th century socialists came to realize that the market wasn't some sort of exploitation mechanism that hurt the average man, but changed their argument to say the market was actually too productive and led to the evil of a materialistic society. Regardless, the general principle of all profits being derived by exploitation of the workers is not an idea taken seriously by any of today's economic schools, as far as I can tell. Apparently you

I said that exploitation may have taken place in the instances you list, only because I'm not familiar with these cases. Were these people being forced to work in these conditions? If there is no coercion going on, I fail to see how it can be considered exploitation. An employer shouldn't be obligated to pay their employees a certain amount or guarantee their safety. We routinely accept certain risks in many professions because eliminating risk completely would prove both impossible and so costly as to plunge large chunks of the population back into real poverty.

As for the story of the woman who died due to being denied water and shade, the owners of that farm could easily be put in jail. It's called depraved indifference. If you take actions which would expected to cause the outcome of harm to another, that is a crime, and we don't need any special new labor laws to prosecute it. This may also apply to some of your other examples.

To indict all businesses, or the free market as a whole, because of the actions of a few bad ones, is just silly. You really need to get a sense of proportion here. It would be like saying we should never have governments ever again because the Nazis killed a few millions jews. We need to make sure we prosecute criminal businessmen, but we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Theres a HUGE difference between a child working on their family farm or working with your father and learning a trade, as was done for centuries and a child being an industrial worker in a factory which, according to the 1900 census, would have included 1 in 6 American children.

We didn't have children working in factories in the 18th century because we didn't have factories... And believe it or not, the vast majority of factory child laborers were not working in those terrible conditions you hear about in the fiction of the era. Certainly some factory conditions were poor, and the adults suffered in the same environment, but were the conditions really that much worse than on some farms, where a child may have to be exposed to mounds of chicken feces, farm equipment, and other threats? I'm sure you have this picture of a child skipping through meadows carrying buckets of milk from the barn, but farm work was actually fairly hazardous in relation to many other professions of the 19th century.

Because they had no choice you moron. They weren't being paid a living wage. They were also being exploited and untill the formation of unions there was absolutly nothing they could do about it, other then starve.

Trade unions were around long before the period we're talking about... And if people had no choice but to starve before the formation of unions (early 19th century), why isn't the human species extinct? How did we get by before that?

It wouldn't take Johnnie Cochran to win the case. Compare the womans education and work history to her male counterparts and see if they're being paid the same.

You sound very naive right now. So many factors go into how much a person is paid. Unless you hired 2 exact same people at the exact same time in the exact same department and doing the exact same job, it will be very difficult to know whether there was discrimination. As these cases will be heard in civil court instead of criminal, there's a much greater chance of being found guilty when there was no wrongdoing. Certainly you must at least understand that knowledge in this world is imperfect and as such, mistakes will be made. Even if they reform tort law so that loser pays (a very necessary reform), the additional cost to the business for hiring a woman is not zero. The actual cost is unknown at this point, but good entrepreneurs and businessmen will do their best to factor this cost in, which will lead to less employment opportunities for women. This law will encourage exactly the kind of behavior it is looking to prohibit.

Finally, I find it strange that in each post, I respond fully to all of your charges and points, and you choose maybe 15% of my posts to respond to. I understand the other 85% is probably impossible for you to refute, so you just ignore it. But it does make it seem like you've conceded pretty much all of my argument at this point, and are now just hitting on every anti-business talking point you've ever heard in a vain attempt to feel like your ideas still make any sense at all.

Equal pay for equal work will do to women what minimum wage laws have done to blacks: Increase unemployment, which in turn makes it harder to gain the skills necessary to command a higher wage in the future. We are selling them down the river.