Ethel Rosenberg: Born Bad?

David,

I think Bryan’s claim was somewhat different. He didn’t say socialists were born bad – he said that socialism, the movement itself, was born bad. Put another way, the problem with socialism wasn’t, as some claim, that a good ideal was corrupted by bad people. The problem was that good people were corrupted by a bad ideal. The difference is subtle but important, I think.

Here’s a previous post of his on the subject http://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/04/explaining_soci.html

Dave Churvis –

Prof. Henderson anticipates your point when he writes:

And what we do know is that she and her gang were perfectly willing to physically bar the substitute workers from getting into the business. Didn’t these workers have lives? Didn’t their preferences and their values count? No.

You can make the argument that the strikers were attempting to improve working conditions for all, but in order to make that argument, you must accept the premise that Rosenberg’s gang knew best for all, and any other worker who preferred other arrangements simply didn’t know what was good for them.

@RPLong,
Good point.
@Dave Churvis,
The basic monopoly model applies here. Rosenberg et al were trying to monopolize the supply of labor. To do so, they intimidated competitors.

Isn’t the communist/socialism tendency towards violence was ‘to combat’ the capitalist colonial empires of Europe. Isn’t that how Lenin sold communism in the Soviet Union that the most capitalist country England was also the largest colonial empire. He argued that capitalism needed colonial empires to sell goods and continue to exploit labor. Capitalism needed the East India Company to ensure its status. In most ways the United Kingdom did not follow the basics of Baptiste writings.

I know David to be a true libertarian but how do long term forsee Chinese government capitalism.
CR

@ David

Yes I do sometimes make guesses. But when all I have to go on is a guess, I don’t post on the internet an opinion that a specific person had an evil intent that I know I am guessing about.

The form of your argument in this post is the same as the form used by those who argue that Tea Party members have racist motivations: We don’t know that they are racist but we can guess. What we do know is that they are perfectly willing to support policies that hurt minorities.

Just because guessing is all you can do doesn’t make it a good idea. I expect that those who supported the strikers had a wide variety of opinions about what were legitimate tactics.

@Greg G,
I think your analogy with the Tea Party is a good one. If I heard about a Tea Party event where a bunch of white people roughed up a black person, a good guess would be that many of them were racists.

@ David

Yes in your example it would be a good guess that “many” of them were racists but it wouldn’t tell us much about the motivations of a specific Tea Party member who hadn’t participated in the assault, would it?

@Greg G, DRH: In my experience leftists are proud of their part in such protests. Ethel was certainly lionized for her part in them. Had she been ashamed of the violence she could have withdrawn or disavowed. Emma Goldman, another young activist leftist woman, did. Evidence I think for David’s guess. Silence speaks.

I disagree that the strikers were attempting to monopolize the labor supply, though. I know that’s a convenient economic shorthand, and ultimately the result they achieved. But what they were essentially doing was trying to improve working conditions for all. By lamenting the inability of the worst off in society to accept horrible conditions for a pittance, what we’re effectively doing is providing a smokescreen for an employer who has no interest in his employee’s well-being. As economists, I know we are supposed to look at this in a value-free manner, but I can’t just turn a blind eye to awful working conditions in the name of higher profits.

@Gene I thought it was the other way around, namely that a combination of ideology and power structure can cause normal people to do terrible things. The Stanford prison experiments were designed to test whether prisoner abuse was the result of the guards’ personality traits, and they very famously found that even normal, psychologically healthy people can abuse others they believe to be beneath them.

fel, here’s one of Bryan’s posts where he mentions the theory that “the movement” was born bad:

I guess as it’s described there the “born bad” could arguably be applied to either the ideology or the people promoting the ideology. Ultimately this could be a meaningless semantic problem I’m pointing out. I just thought the beginning of Henderson’s post stated the point in an odd way … seeming to say something about the inborn character of certain people, as opposed to how they behave as adults in thrall to a certain ideology.

Dave Churvis:

Yes, exploitation. … My favorite example is ..Many women died because their employer locked them in the factory to prevent desertion

Wait. Your are likening a situation where replacement workers are EAGER to do the job, and are attcked to keep them out, to a situation where workers had to be CAGED to get them to do the job? Really?

@ David

It seems just as likely to me that this could have been a mob action that the strike leaders realized would do more to undermine popular support than advance it. It seems just as likely to me that she might have avoided publicly criticizing those responsible to avoid a schism in the movement. Either of our guesses could be correct which is why this might not be the best situation for guessing.

There were many inexcusable acts of violence by both sides during this period of labor strife. If I was to guess, I would guess that we will only see the acts of violence by one side emphasized on this blog.

There were a few who quit, prompting the employer to lock everyone in.

Please provide proof that was the reason.

It was not uncommon back then to lock some of the doors during work hours to help prevent theft, break-ins, workers taking unscheduled breaks, etc.

You do realize the workers left and went home at night?

Anyway, even in your own example, not all the doors were locked. The problem was the fire cut many people off from some of the unlocked doors, and all of the doors were hard to open and use quickly in an emergency with lots of rushing people because they opened inward rather than outward.

In retrospect, doors opening outward is an important thing, but even so I do not think you are intending to claim that the use of doors that opened inward was done with the intent of maximizing the death toll in the off chance of an emergency?

*Gene. My apologies.

@Dave Churvis

I agree that your last example is exploitation. I agree that it is morally wrong and that no employer should offer such a job. As such, I would never take such a job, I would encourage other not to take such jobs, and I would avoid buying products from that employer.

Here’s the catch though: it isn’t up to you or me to decide when others are being exploited; that is up to them. We agree that what the employer is doing is morally wrong, but that worker may find it morally justifiable. I recognize, as a libertarian, that each individual has the fundamental right of self-determination, and that extends to the situation of possible exploitation.

You might argue that since the actions of the employer are morally wrong and potentially harmful, that we should stop his behavior through legislation. My response is an analogy; that is exactly how conservatives justify banning abortion clinics. In our pluralistic society, we don’t all agree on what is morally justifiable. If we legislate based on our own morality, we by definition limit the freedom of others to have a different moral opinion. Isn’t forcing a person to pay taxes to enforce a moral viewpoint that they don’t agree with ALSO exploitation?

Kevin, I absolutely understand your point about the libertarian principle of preserving choice and putting as few constraints on people as possible. In general, I find it to be a noble approach to most problems. However, there is a degree of relativism to your response that I find difficult to accept. Let me switch gears completely to illustrate why.

I am a gay man. I live in a state where my employer could fire me specifically because I am gay, and that would be an absolutely legal action. Now, here’s my question: is my employer’s right to fire me for being gay more important than my right to continue being employed? The libertarian approach seems to be that imposing a law forbidding my employer from firing me for being gay imposes an undue burden on my employer; after all, if he does not like gay people, why should he be required to keep me around? But without such a law, I will always be at the mercy of someone else’s moral choices, forced to seek out those few employers who specifically commit to not firing people like me.

So I dispose with the libertarian argument entirely and come down on the side of a law that preserves the dignity of people like me. The right of my employer to fire me takes a backseat to my right to keep my job regardless of his prejudice. It is for this same reason that I am in favor of employee protection laws of many different kinds.

You are arguing from a place of purity and logic, and I absolutely respect you for it. I am not arguing from the same place, and I frankly think that my argument is more conducive to a better world for all, powerful and powerless alike. The libertarian perspective is perhaps more consistent and more logically sound, but it doesn’t always work very well for those who are already disadvantaged.

Dave Churvis:
There were a few who quit, prompting the employer to lock everyone in.

Uh…no. The employees weren’t being held against their will. The doors were locked because some employees had a tendency to use fire escapes for malingering or to smuggle out merchandise.

In retrospect, this was a bad idea with tragic consequences, but the owners were in fact trying to solve a legitimate problem, and not just being jerks. It’s also worth noting that the fire appeared to have been caused by an employee’s unauthorized smoking.

Much of what leftists characterize as exploitation of low-wage workers, including the low wages themselves, is actually the employer’s response to the fact that many of them are pretty lousy workers, who steal, slack off, and in general do only as good a job as is absolutely necessary to avoid getting fired. If they were better workers, they’d be able to get better jobs.

The Foxconn thing was hugely overhyped. Foxconn has nearly half a million employees in Shenzhen, so even in 2010, when there were 14 suicides, that’s about three per 100,000, far below the national average of 20-30 per 100,000. In other years, the suicide rate for Foxconn employees at Shenzhen has been consistently below 1 per 100,000.

It’s possible that the cluster of suicides was caused by publicization of Foxconn’s practice of giving payments to families of the deceased, which may have pushed some borderline cases over the edge.

GregG: The form of your argument in this post is the same as the form used by those who argue that Tea Party members have racist motivations: We don’t know that they are racist but we can guess. What we do know is that they are perfectly willing to support policies that hurt minorities.

President Obama and many other left-wingers support policies that tend to hurt minorities. Those policies include minimum wages laws, gun control laws, and Great Society type programs, for a few big examples. Shall we conclude (“guess”) that they are also acting on racist motivations?

Brandon, seriously, not in retrospect. Locking employees in a high-rise building is a prospectively bad idea. Maybe if they payed decent wages the workers wouldn’t have stolen goods, although that sure sounds pretty illogical if you sit and think about it.

If they are bad employees there is a line of new ones to try out, fire them. Second, because some in the past were caught stealing you preemptively lock all current employees in who have not been proven to have stolen anything. Kinda like making everyone go through a scanner because you just never know who might be a terrorist. It is a bad system – I wonder how you would feel if your family member had burned or jumped to their death because the employer couldn’t be bothered to deal with a problem well.

@ Chris Koresko

I think you misunderstood my point. I was trying to show that this form of argument is defective. I was not trying to show that it should be applied to more situations.

David, great post. You and Bryan are on fire these days. Ultimately, it’s all about the ethics.

Dave Churis:

And it is my contention that the employer that hires that person is exploiting that person due to their lack of options.

And yet that person is still better off being offered the job than not being offered the job.
This is my problem with the word “exploitation”, it leads leftists to focus on the person who is actually doing something to help someone who is in trouble. If people are in poverty, and you offer them a crappy job, according to a leftist you’re exploiting them. But how often do you see a leftist criticising a capitalist for not employing people in poverty?

Now, take your situation of being gay, and at risk of being fired for it. Say the legal system means you have a right not to be fired for being gay. Your employer then fires you for the stated reason of being crap at your job, or perhaps makes you redundant as not needed (a legitimate reason I think we all agree). However, it is possible that your employer was lying, and was actually firing you for being gay. To enforce this right, the legal system needs to investigate the circumstances. And the people in the legal system don’t have mind-reading skills. So they can only look at the evidence that’s presented, and they will somehow come to a view on whether you were fired for being gay or fired for being crap at your job, or just redundant. If your right is to be sensible, the burden of proof will need to be on the employer. So if the employer wants to fire you for being crap at your job or redunant, they need to have proper documentation systems in place. If they make a mistake, then they lose in court. This raises the cost of employing anyone.

Now if you raise the price of something, at the margin, people buy less of it. Yes, the cost of documenting isn’t that much, but some employers, particularly small ones, really hate paperwork, and some employees aren’t that valuable to the firm. And as you yourself point out, it’s typically easier for an employer to get along without employing someone, than a worker to get along without a job, so unemployment makes workers worse off than employers. So protecting you against being fired for being gay makes life worse off for workers and would-be workers in general. And not just workers in general, if you ever want to move jobs, say to be near your parents as they’re getting older, or because you made the mistake of getting into a long-distance relationship with someone you really love, you would find it harder to find a new job.

You say you don’t want to live in a society that blindly adheres to a principle that sounds great in theory but actively harms people in actual practice, and then you propose a liability rule that does just that.

Tracy W, two points:

One, any employment rule whatsoever has costs that in theory reduce maximum employment. Why do we have them? Because we consider the cost in lowered employment worth the benefits of, for example, employers having to provide safe working conditions.

So really, the only question is whether *this* benefit is worth the cost. Pointing out that there *is* a cost is not really the point. (Agreed, a lot of people think you can get that benefit for free, but I don’t think you’ll find that level of ignorance among the readers of this blog.)

In a larger sense, however, I’m not certain that you are correct about removing impediments to business always improving the economy. First, societies can lock themselves into unproductive modes (think racism and sexism), which are often (gradually) broken by government practices which on the surface impede business.

Secondly, citizens who feel secure are often more wiling to spend, avoiding situations like China where the citizenry, having no labor or health security, save everything, massively holding back on consumer spending and making the economy (and the jobs) much smaller than necessary.

I won’t pretend that anyone can figure out exactly what provides optimal employment. But I will say that ignoring any second-order effects of labor legislation probably does not give accurate long-term answers. That it’s hard to measure doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

It also occurs to me, Tracy, that you’re making a common, and rather mistaken, assumption that the employer is offering a wage magnanimously and that he could not possibly offer it for more. However, the employer is attempting to maximize profit, not well-being. My argument is for a healthier mix of both, so I fear that we may be talking past one another.

Ken B, I am making no such statement. I am referring to the employer who offers the job and explicitly stating that there will always be someone hard up enough to accept it. Pretty much the exact opposite of what you’re saying that I’m saying. you might want to try harder before attempting to make me look foolish. I may be incorrect, and can be convinced of such, but I assure you that it won’t happen by playing intermediate logic games with my words.

@Dave Churvis: No it is not the opposite of what you are saying, it is so to speak the reverse. That is, it is the mirror image. You say the employer benefits as he gets a worker for $3 when he’d still make a profit paying $4. True! I am saying the worker is also better off because he’s getting $3 for a job he’d do for $2.

That’s how trade works.

My syntactic play with your argument highlights the symmetry you overlook.

@Tracy W, it does not appear that Dave Churvis acknowledges the costs. This is but my impression from his posts. I’m willing to be wrong, but he seems to be one reader here who appears to deny the costs involved with intervention, or damn the consequences in favor of the unmitigated good of the chosen regulation. I think that most would agree with you that removing impediments to business won’t *always* result in an improved economy, nor would removing *all* such impediments create completely positive outcomes. I assume that you would agree that not *all* regulation accomplishes its intended purpose as well. It would seem that what Tracy W was attempting to do was to impress upon Dave the importance of thinking through the objections he has to libertarian rationale in general, although I am willing to be wrong about that too.

@Dave Churvis, you said: “I guess I would prefer to live in a society where I am protected from that kind of discrimination than one that blindly adheres to a principle that sounds great in theory but actively harms people in actual practice.”

But you didn’t answer my question. Would you repeal the 1st amendment to satisfy your preference for such a society? Would you sacrifice the freedom of many (including the freedom to be ignorant and bigoted) for your own ‘protection’? The Law, it is said, is blind. It is thus, so that we as people are ‘equal under the law’. Is this ‘blind adherence to principle’ something you’re uncomfortable with? Would you remove the blindfold of law to actually institute discrimination?

Do you deny that the work businesses are necessarily forced to engage in (when they are under the employment mandates you suggest) *might* lead a business owner to consider hiring less? Is there no way this can be possible? And if businesses are choosing to hire less, is this not also *possibly* hurting workers they *might have* hired if said business wasn’t forced to consider this extra expense of time and resources? Is that not a reasonable, real world, line of thinking? If not, why not? If so, why isn’t it a reasonable conclusion to reach to say that such laws actually harm the people they are instituted to assist?

What right do you have to dictate to an enterprise, that you have no direct connection with, what wage they offer for a particular job? How do you justify your authority to do so? How do you know what they can or cannot afford for anything they must pay for, much their labor cost? Do different businesses have different measures for establishing wages? How do you know? Are you not yourself ‘blindly adhering’ to a particular principal by forcing each enterprise to pay ‘wage A’ or to ‘don’t discriminate or else’ regardless of circumstance?

Bottom line, you said ‘The right of my employer to fire me takes a backseat to my right to keep my job regardless of his prejudice’. My response… my right to be prejudicial trumps your right to keep your job. I would prefer to live in a society where we have freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly. One where such prejudices, should they exist, are openly expressed. That way I can associate with whom I wish and avoid whomever I choose. If a business is openly hostile to me for whatever reason, I don’t have to work there, and I don’t have to patronize them. In short I would rather live in a society which celebrates freedom and allows ‘exit’, rather than one which one which celebrates diversity and forces conformity.

@UnlearningEcon, you didn’t answer my question. There isn’t evidence, so far as I can tell from the documentation you cite, of a stated doctrine of capitalism which calls for Socialist blood in order to establish itself. I am not convinced that the instances of atrocities cited can be fully laid at the feet of the free market, nor do those atrocities justify the wholesale slaughter of millions of innocent non-combatants mitigated by nearly every major Communist regime which has come to power. I still await the name of a free-market advocate who equally advocates violence in order to establish the Free Market.

Mass propaganda campaigns in Italy by the CIA? You’re speaking past me again… I can agree to the elimination of the CIA altogether… how’s that? Let’s do away with all covert operations, in fact! I’m happy to limit US military engagements to stopping outright invasions of our country and preventing ICBM’s from falling on my town… return the land we use for foreign military bases, and return our soldiers home… what say you? Do we have an agreement? 🙂

When the police get violent at a protest, the Marxist says, ‘… the police simply exist to protect the capitalist state’. Does that make the Marxist right?

And wave your hand all you want… when ‘business is in bed with the State’, it means the State has too much power, not the other way around. Your argument isn’t with Capitalism. It’s the State’s bed after all.

Patrick, we’re talking about low-wage workers here. Typically the employer offers a job at a wage, and the employee takes what he’s offered. At no point have I been talking about the kind of highly-skilled labor that allows for bilateral negotiation. Additionally, lack of recoupment on a risk that was taken is not the same as offering a pittance to do a dangerous job because you know some poor desperate soul would be willing to take it.

Dave,

I understand your argument and while I don’t agree it is one that gives me a great deal of pause for thought. However:

I look at it as “this worker is trading his time for money but not making enough to make ends meet, thus wasting valuable time.”

In the above you say the low skilled worker’s valuable time is being wasted. Clearly however, the ‘value’ of the worker’s time doing something else is less than the wage he/she is being paid, at least to that worker. If this wasn’t the case, then the worker would not sacrifice this other endeavour that he could have pursued with his “valuable time” in order to work.

Dave Churis:

There is not a shred of evidence to support the notion that anti-discrimination laws suppress hiring. Prove me wrong and I will eat my words.

See “Consequences of Employment Protection? The Case of the Americans with Disabilities Act”, by Daron Acemoglu and Joshua D. Angrist, at http://economics.mit.edu/files/17

Tracy, that you’re making a common, and rather mistaken, assumption that the employer is offering a wage magnanimously and that he could not possibly offer it for more.

Dave, I have re-read my comment, and I have no idea what I wrote that could possibly have given you such an impression. Can you please do me the kindness of pointing out what it is, so I can avoid thus creating such a false impression in the future?

(Note, I have had this interaction before in the past, of people asserting I hold a position which I can’t see any trace of, I’ve responded by asking them to state what gave them such an impression, and so far no one has ever responded. I hope you break the pattern.)

Dave Churvis:

The libertarian argument, however, seems to be that because the employer is offering any wage at all, he is doing something beneficial to a worker. I am operating from the position, however, that paying less than a living wage is harmful to the worker.

Actually that’s not the libertarian position, that’s logic. An offer is not compulsion. That is why your analogy with locked doors is so absurd.

Dave Churvis:

you seem to be operating under the assumption that i have not thought of both sides of the argument.

Not so, I accept you thought of both sides. But I am in possession of proof you did not understand both sides.

@guthrie: I think you’re being unnecessarily apocalyptic here. Of course I’m not in favor of repealing the First Amendment. I also happen to take a slightly more nuanced view of the law than you do. A fundamental right to self-expression and self-organization, in my view, does not extend to the right to destroy someone’s well-being because you don’t like who they are.

@Joel: “Clearly however, the ‘value’ of the worker’s time doing something else is less than the wage he/she is being paid, at least to that worker.” Let’s take an example of an unskilled single mother. She has a child to take care of. If she finds a job, she must now pay for child care, transportation, etc., and must also now take time away from that child and devote it to work. If she does not find a wage sufficient to counteract the additional drain on her time from the job she has taken, she is wasting her time. It is for this reason that her time might be more valuable doing something other than wage-gaining work when wages are that low.

@Patrick: Yes, in terms of the entire business cycle, the employer is the middleman. However, in the terms of how hiring decisions are actually made, that employer simply has a specific budget and is going to try to get the labor he’s looking for for the lowest price possible. The full business cycle has no relevance here. Additionally, you have missed my point. You were talking about bilateral wage negotiation, and I’m telling you that doesn’t happen for the lowest-level jobs.

@Tracy: Thank you for the paper. It gives me a great deal of food for thought, and I’ll make a blog post about it once I’ve had a chance to read it. As for the “magnanimous” bit, it’s contained in this quote:

And yet that person is still better off being offered the job than not being offered the job.
This is my problem with the word “exploitation”, it leads leftists to focus on the person who is actually doing something to help someone who is in trouble. If people are in poverty, and you offer them a crappy job, according to a leftist you’re exploiting them. But how often do you see a leftist criticising a capitalist for not employing people in poverty?

In my view, the employer is not helping the employed when he offers too low of a wage. By framing this as the employer “helping someone in trouble”, I think you’re leaving the impression that employer is doing it out of the good of his heart. At least that’s how I read it.

@Ken B: “I am in possession of proof you did not understand both sides.” Right back at you, man.

@Tom West: thank you for articulating that point better than I ever have.

However, in the terms of how hiring decisions are actually made….

Why do I have the impression that you have, never in your life, hired anyone?

Assuming that you are misusing the term ‘business cycle’ to mean something like ‘product cycle’, the reason the employer is looking to ‘get the labor he’s looking for for the lowest price possible’, is that if he doesn’t he won’t be competitive in pricing his products for consumers. Other business will undercut him on price, and he’ll go out of business.

In which case, I ask again, is that a case of the employees (overpaid in hindsight) ‘exploiting’ their employer?

@Patrick: why do I have the impression that you have never, ever actually run a business and have only simulated them under perfect competition? Hiring someone and paying them more than your competitors do might actually increase one’s profits, especially when the higher income leads to increased productivity. I know firsthand that a more motivated employee can accomplish tasks quicker than a less motivated one.

@Guthrie: firing them for being gay.

Tracy W,

Sorry, my post was less than clear, and I was assuming a generalization that you never made.

This was the paragraph that I was addressing:

Now if you raise the price of something, at the margin, people buy less of it. Yes, the cost of documenting isn’t that much, but some employers, particularly small ones, really hate paperwork, and some employees aren’t that valuable to the firm. And as you yourself point out, it’s typically easier for an employer to get along without employing someone, than a worker to get along without a job, so unemployment makes workers worse off than employers. So protecting you against being fired for being gay makes life worse off for workers and would-be workers in general. And not just workers in general, if you ever want to move jobs, say to be near your parents as they’re getting older, or because you made the mistake of getting into a long-distance relationship with someone you really love, you would find it harder to find a new job.

I was trying to point out the general case that while in the first order, an impediment to business (such as not allowing employment-at-will) would reduce jobs, it might have the opposite effect in the long term. (I carelessly used “improvement to the economy” when I meant generally more jobs, and greater wealth.)

My apologies for assuming a generalization of the sentiment in the quotes that you didn’t actually make. My mistake.

Tom

@Dave, thank you for explaining it. I did not realise that anyone could think that such a statement of mine could be read as the employer doing it out of the goodness of their heart, I will make sure in the future to add an aside pointing out the selfish motives.

It still remains that you are focusing on those who are (out of their own self-interested motives) doing something that makes the poor person better off by their lights, rather than those people who aren’t doing that. (For example, capitalists who don’t employ desperately poor people. Yes some people give to charity, but clearly charitable impulses are not enough to bring millions beyond living on <$2 a day.). I know that in your view, an employer is not helping when they offer too low of a wage. But imagine you are a desperately poor person, trying to feed your family, on $2 a day because you can't find a way of making more money. If someone offers you a job paying $4 a day (with all other conditions being equal), wouldn't you prefer to have that job offer? Even though, in your view (I suspect as a Westerner making above $20 a day), such a job offer isn't helping? How would you feel if some rich guy persuaded that potential employer to withdraw their job offer, because it was "exploiting" you? In other words, can you lay aside your view, and consider this from the view of the desperately poor?

Note, on the point of governments changing social practices – centuries of discrimination by European governments against Jews did not lead to Jews all converting to Christianity. Centuries of discrimination by the English government against Catholics did not lead to Catholics all converting to Protestantism.
While laws mandating discrimination against are different in many ways from laws mandating merely an absence of discrimination, these experiences do really make me doubt the ability of government practices to change a society that isn’t already open to change.

Note: The US south may have been one case where anti-discrimination laws had a big impact on employment rates, but even there social change started with blacks fighting discriminatory practices.
And the US north had also historically been very racist, it was changes in social attitudes there (and amongst south American blacks and a few south American whites such as LBJ) that changed the federal government’s laws.

@Dave Chruvis: re your comment about the safety net.

That’s why a lot of libertarians advocate a social safety net. Usually though we prefer something like a guaranteed income, a negative income tax, rather than govt administered programs. The most prominent advocate of that was Milton Friedman, and I am an advocate of it too.

My mom’s best friend’s father was a lawyer for the Rosenbergs. They where typical American Jewish Liberals. Even though they lost the trial, their status was enhanced where it mattered.

In ‘intentionville’ they are saints in their own minds, and actual socialist states are just capitalistic subversions of their vision.

It’s days later, but I just came across (and blogged about) a sentence that might give more food for thought:

‘As Chinese workers have begun to fight for their rights and wages have risen for skilled labor in the coastal provinces – and there we are back in Marx’s Chapter 10, reading about “the struggle for the normal working-day” – jobs have begun to flow out of China to lower-wage economies like Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia.’

http://www.extraordinaryinsignificance.com/very-good-sentences/