So long as a plump, well-kept, hearty negro was worth $1000, no slave-owner, selfish or cold-blooded as he might be, would keep his negroes as great classes of "free-born Englishmen" must live. But these white slaves have no money value. It is not the labor, it is the land that commands value" (emphasis added). [15]
Elsewhere, a contemporary of Henry George, and former slave-owner, laughingly told him it was cheaper just to pay low wages for menial work to be done than to have to house and feed his former slaves. He went on to say that, had he known how much he would have saved by not having to house and feed his former slaves, in exchange for paying them a mere pittance to labor for him, he would have been in favor of abolition a long time before it finally came. How true is this labor equation in many parts of the world, still.
It is worth noting in this regard that it is the resource-rich regions, not the resource-poor ones, where labor conditions are the most appalling. In fact, we can narrow George's strong implication into an axiom: Wherever the relationship between Land and the human labor to develop that Land is the least, the degree of human suffering will be the greatest.
Myanmar, for example, has the following resource wealth:
Copper, gypsum, barite, and cement. Steel and iron make up 6% of the country's exports. Myanmar is second in opium production only to another bastion of horrid labor conditions, Afghanistan. Despite an import ban, one can regularly find Burmese Teak in the United States. Myanmar also has rubies, jade, pearls and fish which it exports to the Middle East and Asia, while a third of its own children are malnourished. Natural Gas accounts for 40% of Myanmar's exports, flowing to China - and to Chevron. [16]
Myanmar is resource-wealthy, but its people are impoverished. In fact, when one reads of the atrocious working conditions in Myanmar, one longs for the relative comfort of resource-poor nations that only have sweatshops! At least there, the middlemen sweatshop managers, and factory-owners, act as buffers between the rapacious landowners and laborers.
What has happened to the dream of ever-increasing prosperity for all since George's time? Didn't the neoclassical Chicago School economists and the Free Market economists tell us that as bad as things may seem, that wealth would trickle-down eventually from the top income earners to the bottom, as they developed new businesses? Wasn't it supposed to be that, as Julian Simon famously said in 1997:
The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards. [17]
Indeed, Business Week warned us in a 2006 article on Chinese Factory Workers, that:
companies across the board are feeling the squeeze. Last year turnover at multinationals in China averaged 14%, up from 11.3% in 2004 and 8.3% in 2001. Salaries jumped by 8.4%, according to human resources consultant Hewitt Associates LLC. [18]
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