There's been a kerfuffle about labor standards in (notional) developing nations that I'd been ignoring, but may be worth discussing a bit.

Nicholas Kristof writes a depressing column about Cambodian kids who spend their days picking through giant heaps of garbage seeking usable scraps and dreaming of the day when they might be able to work in a sweatshop. I think it’s wrong to say that all consideration of international labor standards is merely aimed at keeping people stuck on the trash heap, but it’s a valuable reminder about the generally limited ability of just saying “no” to things to accomplish what people want. Part of the reason sweatshops exist and attract laborers is that life on the garbage heap is even worse, as is the life of a third world subsistence farmer. If you want to improve things, you need to actually be expanding the set of feasible options, not just arbitrarily closing down one path.

Damn straight. Matt nails it. So why is this line of thought so elusive for so many would-be decent people? I am constantly dumbstruck that so many who profess to care about “social justice” do little more than complain that desperate people have really terrible options and then work to take away the best options. That, of course, is not the intention, but that’s usually how it ends up working, whether the issue is “sweatshops” or “human trafficking.” Some day, more of us will see the devastating irony in the fact that social justice activists spend a lot of their time making things worse for some of the world’s poorest and vulnerable people.

My emphasis. I suspect that the reason activists can't get their minds around these really quite simple ideas is that they have a romantic notion that the life of a subsistence farmer is idyllic: mother nature's sons and daughters in the garden living sustainably. They have a fuzzy expectation - a malformed wish really - that by making industry impossible they can force the teeming masses out of the urban trash heaps and back to the land.

This is nonsense of course. However awful the trash heap, it provides a better living than they had on the land. The only way that small scale primitive agronomic systems can work - think third world organic - is if there is a robust manufacturing and services base in cities able to subsidize such theme parks, as is done in developed countries. Such a base hasn't developed, and won't unless development is allowed to proceed. They imagine that some combination of aid from developed countries and purchases of the meager farm goods and cottage craft goods produced by the peasants will substitute for a local ecomony able to subsidize its own peasants and so maintain places where social justice activists can take nature tourism holidays.