Innovations in Exploitation

I recall my father's birthday in 1989 when my grandmother presented him with a piece of family history, land deeds issued as pay to a Confederate soldier that were signed by the President of the Confederate States, Jefferson Davis. Up until this moment I had no idea. "Our family owned slaves, grandma?"

My grandmother was this amazingly serene, disarmingly slight woman, raised in the deepest recesses of pre-civil rights Crenshaw, Alabama that every once in awhile made brow-raising comments that at that time defied narrative. I remember how she just looked at me and smiled before saying, "Oh no dear, our family was too poor. Slaves were for the rich people. We just fought the war for them," and left it at that. Like other such statements, her soft-toned response remained emphatic and I knew not to question it any further. We had these conversations a lot.

This morning though I was thinking about that distant relative. The man that left his small tobacco farm where he eked out a meager living for his wife and family to fight for another's Laissez-faire interest in maintaining an impoverished class. In effect he was fighting against his own interests. He had a tract of land that he and his family farmed without the luxury of growth and free labor. The land he was paid in was sold on his return to cover the lost expenses of fighting for an institution that really didn't care for his competition. Southern plantations flourished while southern farms withered and died.

In our society we operate on the supply and demand interests of capitalism. The more workers that are available for production, the lower the wages. Slavery naturally brought that the supply side to near zero when you consider that all a slave owner had to do was pay the initial purchase price, and set aside resources for housing and food.

Some slave owners even made money back by further exploiting slaves as a resource through breeding or lending their pregnant slaves to the care of Dr. J. Marion Sims in his less than kind effort to perfect the practice of episiotomy. This is indeed on the level of innovations in hypothermia research, skin grafting, and plastic surgery as perfected by Dr. Josef Mengele's experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Overall the subject is innovation through exploitation. Innovation isn't just new technologies as it's also recognized in new philosophies, business practices, and economic models. Were we to turn off all of the electronics we would still see that innovation is all around us, but not all of it is OK.

Certainly I've been criticized on the left as embracing protectionism on the side of preserving the American middle-class just as I've been criticized on the right for being critical of free trade agreements that undermine the American middle-class. But I've never been criticized for my stance on human rights. And it makes me wonder why we're OK with outsourcing our slavery? Part of what makes multinationals successful is their ability to acquire labor in areas not only free of tax and tariff, but free of labor and safety laws. That is innovation through exploitation.

Looking back to where we've come from I found this Reason.com article from 2006 advocating free trade. That means it was written pre-Wal-Mart empire and pre-Dhaka, Bangladesh factory fire. It was written before we learned the hard lesson that always low prices come at a human premium. So why don't we make the next innovation one that demands equality through labor and safety laws for American companies using foreign labor for the American market? At the same time lessen some of the domestic agricultural subsidies while taxing the outsourced market that seeks to cut corners by de-legitimizing their costs through dismissing livable wages and workplace safety. Obviously free trade has become the new slavery.