Free Market Libertarianist Lalaland (if you can stomach it)

[Magda Hassan]

Make sure you have the barf bag handy.

Some of you may be struggling under the delusion that third world sweatshops are bad, what with the slave wages, extra long hours, autocratic bosses, lack of unions, military dictatorships that imprison/shoot union organisers, suicides (eg Foxconn) etc. But no! According to this economics professor at a nice comfy US university who doesn't have to ever go near one himself they're actually *good* for you. Oh and in case you didn't realise working for 70 cents a day is actually something that people do out of their own free choice, as opposed to total desperation. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story I always say!

[Jan Klimkowski]

Matt Zwolinski is an Associate Prof of Philosophy and Business Ethics.

And a lackey tool.

[Magda Hassan]

A crash course in American logic

June 10, 2012OPINION

Many of us thought we'd ducked a bullet while drinking bottle after bottle of booze before we saw the blue sky of relative sobriety. We didn't realise high living left its fingerprints on our livers, sometimes its digging fingernails scarring us for life. Only heaven knows why we got two kidneys and just one liver, especially in many God-fearing Irish bodies. The Almighty had as much trouble understanding the Irish as they did Him.
Simon, a composer-musician friend, has lived in Los Angeles for more than 20 years, seeking fame and fortune on a grander scale than available Down Under. Suddenly, on the rim of his sixth decade, his liver stopped in its tracks without warning.
Simon needed a liver transplant immediately and in California, all else being equal, there was a six-month waiting list. He upped and moved to Tennessee, where he got a liver in two weeks, then moved back to LA.
Simon might vote Republican for the first time in his life because of the party's national push to repeal, state by state, mandatory helmet laws for motorcyclists. Tennessee allows adults to choose if they want to wear helmets or not. This individualism is in the Republican DNA (but not a woman's right to choose if she retains a pregnancy).
As a direct result, Tennessee and increasing numbers of other states are peeling back mandatory helmet laws, leading to a surplus of healthy young men's organs becoming available, almost on demand.
Some minds may differ, as blogger Sweet Lady233 put it: ''Organs full of drugs, alcohol and tobacco. I am sure I wouldn't want one.'' Organ beggars cannot be too choosy.
Thirty-one states have returned the motorcyclists' rights to have the wind rush through their mullets. At one time, the states' compulsory helmet laws were tied to federal highway grants. When that policy lapsed, so did state legislators' stand for common sense in the face of the American right to bare not only arms but heads. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration stated head injuries were the leading cause of motorcyclist deaths. Helmets reduced fatalities by 37 per cent and were effectively preventing brain injuries by an incredible 69 per cent. Helmet-free riders had three times the injuries of helmeted ones.
But every cloud has a silver liver and Simon is the beneficiary of a phenomenon that has been examined by three surgeons in a US midwest hospital after they were lobbied by an insurance company to help reintroduce helmet legislation. One surgeon had noticed the plentiful supply of organ donors since the repeal of helmet laws and the trio started to query the ethical question raised by this. The hospital was finally making a profit, transplanting eyes, kidneys and more body parts than a second-hand car yard. Which way should the hospital and its practitioners lean? Organ donations had increased 10 per cent - most from young males and motorcyclists. The dearth of helmets prevented a third of deaths on the waiting lists.
In Australia, we don't have to butt heads with this peculiarly American impulse to encourage death by choice on the roads. It's high-minded patriotism for the highway-minded.
In the schizophrenic US, the supreme court will probably strike down compulsory medical insurance in the name of free choice to be sick and poor.
The same supreme court allowed unlimited corporate funding for politically active groups, which in the capitalist US means Republicans will have more money from multinational corporations, in the name of the First Amendment to engage in an individual's free speech.
This is a land of Swiftian ironies that strike the outsider as ludicrous. Corporations, artificial constructs for increasing and aggregating the particular interests of the shareholders, now have a right to free speech like any person! Next thing they will vote. This is the top judges thinking out loud!
What happened to the greater good for the greater number? This intellectual struggle for the hearts, minds and body parts takes place when all the evidence points one way. Seatbelt laws are being repealed and speed laws will allow increased speeds outside cities, when statistics showed a 10 per cent increase in deaths when limits went from 55 miles per hour (88km/h) to 65 miles per hour.
Some states came halfway: you can feel the wind beneath your wing-tips if you have extra compulsory insurance, but police cannot stop you if you are not wearing a helmet, nor ask for proof of insurance. It is the toothless mouthing of compromise.
Simon followed in the footsteps left by Steve Jobs of Apple. In Silicon Valley, California, organ donors became scarce on the ground because of helmet laws and crackdowns on drink-driving.
Jobs got sick of waiting in LA and got himself a Tennessee liver from a Memphis hospital. It gave him a couple of good years to get the iPad2 out and the iPhone4 off the ground.
He did not move his residence, like Simon, but Jobs's vacancy in the queues would not be an unheard-of proposition. There may never be an iLiver, but if the experience of US state legislatures teaches us one thing, it is the first law of physics and life: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.




http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-an...z1xNQ7dk6q