[Peace-discuss] Obama lies about nukes, too

[C. G. Estabrook]

On MLK day, we might recall Malcolm X's comment, "You can't drive a knife into a 
man's back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call it progress."

Similarly, you can't justify the exploitation of the world's working class on 
the grounds that the capitalist order had previously immiserated them.

The matter was clear to some writers on capitalism long ago:

      "The discovery of America ... made a most essential [change in the state 
of Europe]. By opening a new and inexhaustible market to all the commodities of 
Europe, it gave occasion to new divisions of labour and improvements of art, 
which in the narrow circle of the ancient commerce, could never have taken place 
for want of a market to take off the greater part of their produce. The 
productive powers of labour were improved, and its produce increased in all the 
different countries of Europe, and together with it the real revenue and wealth 
of the inhabitants. The commodities of Europe were almost all new to America, 
and many of those of America were new to Europe. A new set of exchanges, 
therefore, began to take place which had never been thought of before, and which 
should naturally have proved as advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to 
the old continent. The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, 
which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several 
of those unfortunate countries."

--Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations (1776), bk. 4, ch. 1.


--- On *Sat, 1/16/10, rlangenh at illinois.edu wrote:

     In some places, bad as it may be, introduction of sweatshops
     represents economic progress.  Ralph Langenheim


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