The people who own the diamond mine gave birth to you or sired you? That is the only scenario in which they are responsible for your well being. If you start a business in the middle of BF country where everyone is starving, the starving isn’t your fault.
Now if you’re talking about abducting migrant workers (South East Asia Does this alot) or “company store” type bullshit tactics I’m with you. But the diamond mine has no obligation to hire everyone in the village just because the village sucks.
Philosophy 101 class actually. If a town exists where everyone is starving, and you start a business there. Are you obligated to feed everyone there? If you did not cause the destitution, is it your moral obligation to bankrupt yourself fixing societies’ problems?
Ah. I apologize. I thought you knew I had libertarian leanings, where the concern is about the application of force. In a vacuum in our hypothetical African village the state of affairs before the diamond mine arrives:
The local villagers haven’t mastered food/water/shelter and are suffering in squalor.
Diamond miners show up and begin digging. They bring in laborers who know how to mine and employ nobody in the village. People keep starving. The mine didn’t cause the villagers situation and didn’t improve it. Neutral, they applied no force to the villagers.
Diamond miners hire at least 1 worker and save him and his family from squalor (or at least improve standard of life). From a utilitarian standpoint this is a moral outcome. But the many are still starving. That is not because of anything the miners did.
This was a response to the poster saying that firms “hold a gun” to the head of workers in terrible squalor. The Marxist logic being that if the worker doesn’t work for the employer they will starve. People were feeding/clothing/housing themselves long before the existence of companies and jobs.
Some libertarians believe that parents have an obligation to care for their offspring, while others don’t. It’s a pretty wide tent. (The first absolute is my take). If you cause a child to exist you should be responsible for its well being (lots of jurisprudence on this in the US).
If you have a political philosophy that states the villagers’ need represents a claim on the miners assets (in the above scenario) then I’m all ears.
We all know in the real world that some shady companies do use force on the extremely impoverished. For instance red palm oil is harvested by slave labor. The companies will recruit in Indonesia offering great pay and benefits if you go work in another country. Then they will seize your passport and hold you in a different country and force you to work under their terms thousands of miles from home with no chance of escape. Now THAT is initiation of force and immoral behaviour according to my worldview. That is likely what what the OP was referring to. They are two distinct discussions, and the difference is whether force was used.
It’s important to note that defending against any of those can’t be called government interference. All of those(except the third) involve the mines stepping on the property rights of others, and call for defense. If that is where @zecarlo was heading, then I can get on board.
If the people who opened the mine invaded the land where you live and forced you to change how you lived up to that point then they are responsible. Think Cecil Rhodes and the Glen Grey Act. This is why I specifically wrote that the reason you were starving in the first place was because of the people who now “offer” you a job.
By removing you from your land or creating a tax, that you can’t pay, so you remove yourself and go work for the colonists. Glen Grey Act is an example.
If you are allowed to continue that existence. And since I based this on historical facts how can it be a false dichotomy? You think all of those Africans working in diamond mines since the 19th century do so by choice?
What if they are starving because of you in the first place? This gets to the idea that people choose to work in sweatshops because it is a better option than not working there but it ignores the historical reality that it is a better option because of things the sweatshop owners did to make it the better option.
Look at Sierra Leone. It was suffering a brutal civil war. People were getting limbs hacked off by rebels. The nation hires Executive Outcomes, a security/mercenary firm based in South Africa. EO does the job it was hired to do and saves countless lives and limbs. The war was ending but the IMF and UN decided that in order to help Sierra Leone it would need to fire EO. The UN would send in a peace keeping force in its place. EO leaves and the war starts up again because the UN peace keepers don’t do their jobs. They even helped with the trade of blood diamonds. So you have an African nation heading taking responsibility for its stability in its own hands and succeeding but then the UN and IMF have to step in and take over that role, incompetently (maybe deliberately so), so that the type of conditions which keep a nation impoverished, unstable and ultimately exploitable can continue to exist.
This gets to the idea that all of these sweatshops in poor nations are doing those people a favor and that they have a choice.
I’m not sure how a distant government being worse than a less-distant government “gets to the idea that all of these sweatshops in poor nations are doing those people a favor and that they have a choice.”
