Murphy Twin Spin
==> Here’s the latest Contra Krugman, where we talk about corporate tax cuts and Krugman’s Kontradictions.
==> In this IER post, I come up with a car analogy to try to motivate deadweight loss, and give intuition for why a carbon tax–even if revenue-neutral–would reduce conventional economic growth. (To be sure, that by itself doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it *does* blow up the narrative being pushed in certain quarters.) An excerpt:
Suppose the government wants more revenue, and so decides to levy a $1,000 tax on every new car sold in America. Analysts come up with estimates that the new tax will raise such-and-such billion dollars in new receipts for the Treasury.
Now further suppose that someone suggests tweaking the plan. “Look,” the guy says, “right now red cars constitute 20% of the overall market. So instead of levying a $1,000 tax on all cars, we can achieve the same outcome if we instead levy a $5,000 tax just on red cars.”
This is a very bad suggestion, from the point of view of textbook tax analysis. Most obvious, it seems arbitrary and unfair. Why should people who like red cars have to pay a $5,000 tax, when the people who prefer silver cars or brown cars get to pay nothing?
But beyond the arbitrariness and unfairness, there is the problem that with a narrow car tax—which only targets 20% of the market—consumers will adjust their behavior. People who originally planned on buying a red car might instead buy a silver car, and thereby avoid the $5,000 tax.
Because many people will respond this way, it means that the government won’t raise the same amount of revenue from the two possible approaches. If the tax is going to be concentrated just on red cars, then it will have to be made higher—maybe $6,000—to account for the fact that the proportion of red cars in the overall market will shrink, due to the tax. This of course only increases the unfairness of the burden that is being placed on the shoulders of red car enthusiasts.
Yet it gets worse. When the dust settles, there is a permanent loss to society from this onerous tax on red cars. Specifically, there are a lot of people—perhaps millions of them—who were induced to drive a non-red car, even though they would have preferred a red car in the absence of the new tax. So these people are definitely worse off; they’re driving a car with a color they don’t really like.
Unfortunately, there is no corresponding gain to anyone in society from their unhappiness. Remember, these particular drivers aren’t paying any tax; they switched to a non-red car in order to avoid the tax. So the government isn’t gaining any revenue from them, and their unhappiness (at having to drive a non-red car) is a pure loss. Economists refer to this type of outcome as deadweight loss. It is the drag on the economy—the missing out of “win-win” market exchanges—due to inefficient taxation.
If people driving red cars were known to cause $6000 worth of damage to other people (and the $6000 tax is redistributed to these people) compared to non-Red cars will there still be a dead weight loss ?
Transformer, two responses:
(1) You’re not reading carefully. The deadweight loss in the car example refers to people who DIDN’T buy red cars, and hence paid no tax. So there’s no money available to redistribute from them. (In the limit, imagine nobody buys a red car after the tax is imposed. So there’s no revenue collection, but there’s still the deadweight loss.)
(2) If seeing red cars caused some people to have seizures, then yeah I could imagine a mainstream economist saying it imposed a negative externality. In that case, even if no revenue were collected, then the absence of red cars would carry losses still–namely, the lower utility of the people who liked driving red cars–but it wouldn’t be a *deadweight* loss, since there would be people who now benefited from having fewer seizures.
Now in my article, I was careful to say that if you wanted to justify a carbon tax on environmental grounds, that was a fine argument worthy of discussion. But I was singling out the people who are claiming that even if we ignore environmental issues, that a properly structured carbon tax deal could boost conventional GDP growth.
OK, I probably phrased my question badly::
Either they 1) pay the $6000 tax and the people who are harmed are compensated , or 2) they choose not to buy their preferred red car and the harm is avoided.
Only the second would count as a deadweight loss – and I think you are confirming that if there are both people who benefit from the lower number of red cars on the roads, as well as people who lose because the tax causes them to not choose their preferred color, then there may be no deadweight loss?
I don’t disagree with your article – but I think I had assumed that people who proposed a carbon tax did it mostly for environment reasons rather than revenue raising reasons – but I could be wrong on that.
Only the second would POTENTIALLY count as a dead-weight loss
Transformer wrote: “I don’t disagree with your article – but I think I had assumed that people who proposed a carbon tax did it mostly for environment reasons rather than revenue raising reasons – but I could be wrong on that.”
Well it depends which people you mean. Certainly traditional “left-wing” people stress environmental issues.
But the people pitching the idea to conservatives and libertarians–especially under the banner of “tax reform”–are telling them that a properly structured deal will either have very little impacts on the conventional economy, or even (according to some) will boost GDP while reducing climate change as a cherry on top.
But the people pitching the idea to conservatives and libertarians–especially under the banner of “tax reform”–are telling them that a properly structured deal will either have very little impacts on the conventional economy, or even (according to some) will boost GDP while reducing climate change as a cherry on top.
And at the end of your article, you concede that these people are right, claiming only that their pitch is “politically implausible”:
As the diagram shows, the other proposals for “recycling” the revenue back to the citizens are not as destructive. Indeed, taxes on capital (top blue line) are so distortionary that the RFF model found them even more harmful than the carbon tax. But in general, the results show that most of the other methods of raising revenue are less harmful than a carbon tax. The mirror image of that statement, of course, means that even a revenue-neutral carbon tax would hurt the economy, except for the politically implausible scenario where all of the receipts from a regressive carbon tax are funneled into tax cuts for rich capitalists.
The negative external costs associated with carbon emissions are probably much harder to measure than people of the green persuasion typically assume.
But to take the theoretical example of the red car tax: If red cars really do cause $6000 worth of environment damage and the tax causes people to either buy non-red cars or buy non-cars – I’m not seeing that this would have much of an impact on the ‘conventional economy’ and there would be an allocation of costs closer to that that would prevail if all costs were internalized.
And I think this would be the case (at least in the long term) even if red cars were a much larger part of the economy than they actually are .
Say red cars cause $6000 damage each. The tax at $6000 would result in red cars being consumed at the efficient rate as the external costs are internalised.
Some people say that red cars do not cause $6000 of damage. They say that the tax will not be offsetting a cost and so will result in deadweight loss to the economy.
Yet others are saying that if we use the red car tax to off-set other taxes, the deadweight losses will cancel out and we will be as well off as before.
Bob says that not all taxes are the same – some have bigger deadweight loss than others. The red car tax has a higher deadweight loss than the taxes that would be offset.
However, there is at least one tax that would have a higher cost – capital taxes. Also red car tax probably has lower cost than all the regulations that were brought in to discourage red cars.
“Yet others are saying that if we use the red car tax to off-set other taxes, the deadweight losses will cancel out and we will be as well off as before.”
Just thought of another illustration.
Say we already have the red car tax. Somebody claims that blue cars cause $6000 external costs. We should introduce a blue car tax of $6000. This will offset the externality caused by blue cars.
Hold on say others – we don’t think the blue cars cause external costs.
No matter, say the first. We should use the blue car tax to offset the red car tax. Blue and red cars are similarly popular (absent of taxes), so the blue car tax can be used to reduce the red car tax to zero.
It seems fairly clear that we have swapped a red car tax for a blue car tax and are just about as well off as we were.
In this case, the introduction of a revenue neutral blue car tax has very little effect on the economy overall.
So if an oil company destroys someone’s farm and makes the family living on the farm sick, that farm and that family aren’t part of the economy, they’re just part of the environment?
http://splitestate.com/
How rich does someone have to be before they count as part of the economy?
You seem like a fair-minded guy who accurately describes other people’s views, without hysteria. I would like to receive your newsletter.
“In the Congo, where labor was officially free, the government subjected the Africans, up until 1945, to a particularly harsh form of coercion, to the benefit of Lever, by imposing upon them, on the one hand labour contracts punishable by prison and chicotte, on the other hand an onerous head tax which they could pay only by becoming serfs.”
– Jules Marchal, Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts, page 220
Select excerpts from a report by Dr. Raingeard, as printed on pages 121-128 of Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts by Jules Marchal.
“When a native, remarkably enough, managed to resist the threats and blows of the merchants, I have seen government officers offering him the choice between signing a contract and prison.”
“Suppose we leave to one side the legitimacy of a tax which benefits only Europeans and presents the blacks with no compensatory advantages. This tax, which is sometimes equivalent to two or three month’s work, ought to replace corvees in kind, it used to be said; in reality, the two co-exist, and the natives have now to bear the burden of both a tax in money and a tax in kind.”
“By law old men and adolescents of less than sixteen years old are exempt from taxation. In practice, as I have many times observed in Mushuni and Mombanda circles, 80% of old men and 40% of children pay.”
“It is of course the case that when an entire population is put to work, in a manner harmful to its very existence, it cannon be a question of voluntary labour.”
“Entering into the agreement, and then honoring the contract are enforced by means of prison and the chicotte, which are generously administered by government officers, who have been reduced to acting as labor recruiters and as guards supervising convicts on behalf of the companies.”
“Those who do not die at the trading post return to their villages as walking skeletons.”
“They work from six in the morning to six in the evening without a moment’s rest, even in the very middle of the day.”
“Some posts boast of file houses built of half-crumbling adobe, 4 metres by 3 or 4 metres, in which 15, 20 or 25 natives are piled on top of one another. Other managers settle for allowing the new arrivals to build straw huts, outside of work hours of course. In these huts, which are 1.50 metres high, the blacks sleep one on top of the other. In Dunda I saw five in the same bed, which was 1.20 metres long and 0.80 metres wide.”
“Two days later the porters asked for were paraded in front of him, old men, invalids and women, with ropes around their necks.”
“Sanitary conditions are lamentable. Sleeping sickness ravages the local population.”
From a report by Winand Claessens, the Inspector of Trade and Industry, as quoted by Jules Marchal on page 49 of orced Labor in the Gold & Copper Mines: A History of Congo under Belgian Rule, 1910-1945. We do not agree with the opinions of Claessens and are quoting this simply as evidence.
“Conditions of the camp: Good. The only criticism that can be levelled at Robert Williams & Co., the camp manager, is the lack of drinking water. This has been mentioned repeatedly. Only one pipe brings water to this camp. Workers have to queue for hours to get a little water from it. So the overwhelming majority fetch stagnant water, unfit for drinking, from hollows in dry valleys. It is up to the Health Department to determine if the numerous cases of enteritis, dysentery and pneumonia that were registered during the desertions, and in part motivated them, were related to this water.”
“There were a score of deaths between 15 September and 15 October. No doubt the unhealthy conditions, coupled with the mine’s notoriously high accident rate, had an impact on desertions, of which there were 27 in July, 26 in August, 21 in September, and 26 in October.”
“Complaints lodged by the 17 men I talked to are not to be taken seriously: ‘The work is too hard; the Europeans punch and kick us, etc.’ Of course mine work is tiring. Natives are forced to do it under the lash. Mining operations would be impossible if they depended on the good will of natives.”
“A lot of deserters abscond from hospital. They are scared of the European doctor, and have no faith in the effectiveness of his remedies.”
Well, I suppose the head-tax would probably minimize dead weight loss anyway.
@Transformer You get dead weight in the far more literal sense. The weight of dead bodies. Dead weight.
Basically, the villagers were forced away from farming and bartering and whatever else to instead working for wages for Europeans. They were forced to accept the wage labor jobs by the Belgian government, so they could pay the head taxes, so it was wage slavery in the most literal sense. This lead to severe food shortages and starvation. Villagers were also forced out of their comfortable sanitary huts and forced to move into crowded, unsanitary camps so there was a lot of disease too. And they were whipped a lot.
All this also supplied raw materials for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so lots of literal dead weight.
“Tallying up mortality figures at Union Miniere cited in this and preceding chapters (300 in 1912, 720 in 1914-15, 500 in 1916, 420 in 1917, 1,307 in 1918), we get a total of 4,247 deaths at the camps over the six-year period from 1913 to 1918. To this must be added the large number of those who died of illness after running away, or on their way home to their villages after being sent home sick or handicapped. If we add to this the number of deaths from the period before 1913, we can estimate deaths of this nature at about 1,700, making a total mortality figure of 5,000 from the founding of Union Miniere. As for the number of deserters from Union Miniere at the time of the Spanish fle outbreak who might have died soon after, that total is anyone’s guess.” – Jules Marchal, Forced Labor in the Gold & Copper Mines: A History of Congo under Belgian Rule, 1910-1945, pages 77-78
An excerpt from meeting notes as quoted by Jules Marchal on page 42 of Forced Labor in the Gold & Copper Mines: A History of Congo under Belgian Rule, 1910-1945. The views expressed are not our own and we are simply quoting this as a piece of evidence of the attitudes and actions of those running the Congo at the time.
“Natives in this area, like natives everywhere, are inclined to shirk all work, and very rarely agree to work of their own free will. So the only time they feel a need to work is when they are compelled by their tax obligations to do so. We saw this in Ankoro, a region where large numbers of laborers were recently recruited. It is therefore preferable for the Exchange agent to go to work where the tax collector, that is to say, the area agent or administrator, collects taxes.”
Head taxes cause slavery.
“In the Congo, where labor was officially free, the government subjected the Africans, up until 1945, to a particularly harsh form of coercion, to the benefit of Lever, by imposing upon them, on the one hand labour contracts punishable by prison and chicotte, on the other hand an onerous head tax which they could pay only by becoming serfs.”
– Jules Marchal, Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts, page 220
Still pushing minimum wage while using bait and switch to pretend this is really about slavery? Just asking. You know, keeping in touch for old times and that.
All taxation contains an element of slavery within it, because one person is forced to work on behalf of another person. That said, head taxes are particularly stupid by design (they are an attempt to disobey Willie Sutton’s law), I doubt you will find anyone on this blog who supports them.
I also doubt you can find any country on Earth still using head taxes.
Other similar types of tax, such as taxation on dwellings is currently used, but those are not usually high enough to cause people to freak out. Yes a small tax is still bad, but it’s a small bad. Income tax also contains elements of slavery but at least it involves taking from people who have something to take… sadly governments are slowly getting more greedy.
And no I do not support what the Belgians did in the Congo… but that does not form the basis of imposing minimum wage on the people of Bangladesh either.
Oh yeah, and Hillary was an appallingly bad candidate… you need to know that. She 100% deserved to lose, and the more she squirms and hangs out her lower lip, the more hilarious she is and the harder we all laugh at her.
Trump ain’t perfect either, but he was certainly the best option on the day.
You realize my associate had like a bunch of less-than-minimum wage jobs when she was younger? And she does not seem all that upset about it except the times she got cheated. Fair trade or rugmark is not the same as minimum wage. You can opt out of fair trade or rugmark if you don’t like it. Though my associate would say you could opt out of minimum wage too because she thinks illegal jobs are really easy to find.
Unless you’re okay with re-defining minimum wage as, “the minimum wage a given person will voluntarily accept for a given job” or “the minimum reparations required for involuntary labor” in which case yes minimum wage sounds like a great idea.
The definition of slavery is apparently this.
“There’s certainly the question of sustenance, you normally feed your slaves, you normally house your slaves. But beyond that, normally, there is no pay for people in slavery. There could be tokenistic payments, which are given to people in slavery to encourage them to work harder. But the key is not about remuneration. Slavery has never been determined by the presence or absence of remuneration. It’s always been about the total control. And in some ways, when I’m in the field and I’m looking at people who may or may not be in slavery, my rule of thumb question is first, can they walk away, and can they walk away even into a worse situation? So if they can walk away and literally starve to death in a gutter, that’s harsh, but that’s not slavery. But if they are controlled to the point that they lack free will, they lack freedom of movement, then they are in slavery. And then you can begin to talk about the nature and the mechanism by which they are enslaved.”
http://rightstrack.org/modern-day-slavery-counting-and-accounting-1
So as long as you can avoid the tax by going to starve in the gutter instead, it is not technically slavery, though it may have elements of slavery or possibly serfdom, so you could call it exploitation or theft instead.
Or if you prefer you could go by the Bellagio-Harvard guidelines and discuss whether or not the tax establishes “control tantamount to possession”.
Here is a quote straight off the Rugmark website:
Now I am a supporter of people obeying the law, and if the Indian democratic process has come to a conclusion that some minimum wage is what they want then that’s their business. However, in terms of using these two issues (child labour and minimum wage) in a campaign that on the box is supposedly about “slavery” that’s trickery in my books. What’s worse, these things harm the people they are supposedly helping, so I don’t want to support this campaign.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/child-labor-or-child-prostitution
Minimum wage has a similar problem: the people at the very bottom end up unemployed with a wage of zero and then fully destitute. The people second rung from the bottom do well out of it, at the expense of the first group of people.
If you understand the concept of supply and demand, the only way for the price of labour to increase, is by throttling the supply of labour, or in other words keeping a certain number of people unemployed. I see this as both unhelpful and also somewhat immoral.
I don’t know if it makes a difference, but she says she did not actually know the jobs were illegal until years after the fact because people kept telling her she was an independent contractor and she did not find out this had a specific legal definition until much later.
However, there are a variety of factors which establish a natural minimum wage for a given person for a given job, i.e. the amount needed to persuade them to work voluntarily. These may vary from person to person and from job to job but to give you an idea:
* Calories. Working burns calories. If the job does not pay an equivalent amount of food or money to buy food to replace calories burned, the job is a loss.
* Transportation costs.
* Childcare costs.
* Health or danger costs, if the work is unhealthy or dangerous, e.g. working with mercury to pan for gold.
* The danger of being beaten, raped, and/or enslaved by the employer.
* Costs imposed by the employer, e.g. a recruitment fee or being charged for work supplies, often seen in cases of debt slavery.
* Missed opportunity costs. Doing one job means not pursuing one or more other opportunities in life.
Minimum wage laws, as written, tend to be ineffective because they do not consider each person’s individual analysis of the costs/benefits of the job in question. However, there are genuine costs, so it is entirely probable that many people would choose not to accept jobs currently below minimum wage even if minimum wage law were repealed.
Slavery ignores a person’s individual choice on the matter much more ruthlessly than minimum wage law. Minimum wage law can be evaded by people who don’t much care for it. While some slaves do manage to escape, the slaveholders have control mechanisms in place to make escape unlikely or at least risky. Slavery forces people to do jobs that make them worse off.
Rugmark is not the same as minimum wage law. You are not breaking the law if you don’t get a Rugmark certification. However, if their standards are enforced, it does help remove one incentive for slavery from those who choose to get it: the ability to procure workers at below the cost likely to necessary to convince them to work voluntarily. In return, Rugmark gives them a slightly higher price so they can actually afford to pay their workers. Minimum wage law, is, if nothing else, an expression of cultural values, so it is unlikely that an employer paying minimum wage would be likely to need to enslave people to get them to work.
In the specific example of India’s carpet industry, there are apparently large numbers of children who are being locked up and beaten to force them to make carpets, and not being paid whatever it would cost to persuade them to make carpets voluntarily. Many of these children have homes they can return too if set free. It’s ridiculous to think that a person is always better off employed than unemployed. If that were the case, it would not be necessary, from the perspective of the slaveholder, to lock them up.
Even if someone had no where else to go and live, it is still conceivable that if they were in a sufficiently miserable situation, e.g. if the slaveholder was torturing them a lot, that they might prefer starving to death in a gutter.
Hence the reason for the standard given above. “And in some ways, when I’m in the field and I’m looking at people who may or may not be in slavery, my rule of thumb question is first, can they walk away, and can they walk away even into a worse situation? So if they can walk away and literally starve to death in a gutter, that’s harsh, but that’s not slavery. But if they are controlled to the point that they lack free will, they lack freedom of movement, then they are in slavery.”
There are some fates that are literally worse than starving to death in a gutter.
If, as some people seem to believe, full employment is the highest good, slavery is necessary to achieve that goal. The abolitionist necessarily believes, then, that full employment is not the highest good.
You are completely avoiding the point that I’m making and simply repeating “Rugmark is not the same as minimum wage law. You are not breaking the law if you don’t get a Rugmark certification.”
By supporting Rugmark you also are supporting minimum wage law. I do not accept this is helpful. I’m not claiming the two are precisely one and the same, but they are related.
I don’t even own any rugs, except for one which was given to me second hand by a friend who was moving house in a hurry and otherwise it would have been dumped on the side of the road.
Sure, then there is no reason for Rugmark to have any discussion of minimum wage on their website… they can discuss issues of coercion and locking people up against their will. Do you see what I’m getting at with the “bait and switch” ? What are we really talking about here? Are we talking about locking up children and holding them against their will? If so, then you have my support. But if I see the ground shift to something else then I’m rapidly inclined to no longer trust you.
I heard Nasim Taleb say that if someone bullshits you one time, that’s all you need to know about them. I would probably be slightly more tolerant, but not a whole lot more tolerant.
Anti-slavery workers have apparently found numerous examples of children being locked up at carpet looms, independent of Rugmark. Anti-slavery workers also seem to be of the opinion that anything that increases supply chain traceability is likely to have some benefit, if only in terms of providing additional data which can be used to fight slavery, even if that certification was not specifically designed to fight slavery.
An abolitionist thus may endorse a certification which they believe will help fight slavery, regardless of whether or not the people who designed that certification had that goal in mind. The motives of the abolitionist endorsing the certification may be separate from the motives of the people who designed the certification.
Abolitionists have established that there are numerous examples of child slavery in India’s carpet industry. They also believe that Rugmark can be used to help fight the problem. Whether or not Rugmark was intended to be used in this way or designed for some other purpose is besides the point.
It’s not as if minimum wage and slavery are unrelated anyway. The slaveholder is unwilling to pay even natural minimum wage (what is necessary to convince someone to work voluntarily), let alone legal minimum wage. Certification programs often try to counter this by offering those who agree to certification additional money so they can afford to pay better wages. (Or, even if the certification program had some other intent, anti-slavery activists tend to support this tactic for that reason.) So it’s less about supporting minimum wage law than it is about supporting the right of the certifier to get what they specifically paid for. It would be the same if the certifier picked some number other than minimum wage. If a company gave a manager X amount of money, not as wages, but with the explicit expectation that the manager pay the employees under him Y amount of money, would it not the manager be guilty of embezzlement if instead of giving the employees Y amount, he deliberately gave them less and kept more for himself?
“Kidnapped at the age of eight, Raj was taken hundreds of miles from his village and forced to work at making carpets. Locked into the hut that housed the carpet loom, he was fed little, slept next to his loom, was sometimes beaten, and was never paid. He and a number of other children were under the complete and violent control of the man who ran the looms. Raj was forced to work from very early until very late; he was given no schooling and no play. He was beaten if his work slacked off. As he bent over the loom, his spine began to curve. As he constantly breathed fine wool dust, his skin and throat itched and his lungs clogged. His eyesight began to fail as, shut inside the dark shed, he strained to see the tiny knots he was expected to tie over and over again. Cuts, injuries, and illnesses were ignored. After five long years of bondage, antislavery workers carried out a raid on the loom. They found a stunted, confused, sick, and intellectually underdeveloped child. Raj was withdrawn, in shock, and frightened as a result of the trauma of beatings and enslavement. His total being, his body, mind, and spirit, needed immediate help. Raj’s story is not unique; he is one of thousands of children in the same situation. The crucial difference is that Raj is one of the lucky few who have been rescued.” – Kevin Bales, Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves, pages 22-23
“A rescued child slave at Bal Vikas Ashram explained:
No, no, I will absolutely not let my parents send any of my brothers to the loom. When it comes to the loom owners, I was badly beaten. . . . In fact, they made us work day and night on the loom. I will make sure that none of my brothers get caught in the same trap. [And if you spotted a trafficker in your village?] Yes, I will go to the police station right away, I will file a report and inform them about the presence of such a man.”
“Bal Vikas Ashram does an amazing job, rescuing more than one hundred children a year, but this is just a small fraction of the thousands of children kidnapped and tricked into the carpet looms. (We estimate that more than 100,000 children are enslaved in carpet making.)”
– Kevin Bales, Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves, page 46
“My name is Rambho Kumar and I am 11 years old. I used to work at home and I also used to play and roam around with the kids living nearby. A man named Shankar and the owner of the loom came one day to my house and gave 700 rupees [$15] for me. They told my parents that they’re going to educate me and make me do some work. I didn’t want to go to the looms. I wanted to stay at home. But there was no money at home for us to eat so my mother told me to go. I was crying and saying that I didn’t want to go there. They said that they’re going to give me money. He’ll send money home and then after some time I can come back. But after a very long time he told me that I’m not going to be able to go back home ever.”
“After two days I reached the loom and they made me sit. They told me to learn how to use the loom. My hand got cut and the owner and his brother shut my eyes and put my finger in boiling oil and said: ‘Now it’s all right, now you get back to work.’ If I made any mistake, the loom owner used to take a stick and beat me with that. I kept asking the loom owner when I would go to school, and he kept telling me: ‘There is no school for you. You will spend time weaving carpets.'”
“I used to work from four in the morning till 11 in the night. I wasn’t allowed to play or roam around or anything. At about ten in the morning we used to get our first meal which was not good, and then I would go back to weaving the carpets till about ten at night. And that was all we did during the day: weaving carpets, eating food, and going to sleep. I was there for one year. I wanted to go back home. I always used to want to get away. The owner used to tell us: ‘If the police ever come, run away before they can catch you.’ So I knew that when the police came I’d be taken away from there. When I saw them coming I was very happy. As soon as they came, the owner and his father and his brother and all the other people ran away. About ten of us were surrounded by the police. Six of us ran away but four of us were brought to the Ashram. When I came here I liked it because you get time to eat, you get time to play, to study. I like studying the most.”
“I haven’t seen my mother for the last 13 months and I miss my family a lot. My father has passed away. We put 6000 rupees [$130] into expenses for his treatment but still he passed away. Now we don’t even have a place to stay over there in the village. I want to help my mother find a house. I want to go to my village and be a guard there, and I think I’ll be able to study and earn money. And I won’t let anybody go to the looms even by mistake. I’ll tell them: ‘They hit you and they beat you.’ I would not let them go there, ever. If the children make any mistakes they beat them up. I won’t let them go there.”
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:b_8gW6mdousJ:www.antislavery.ac.uk/items/show/114+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
“My name is Ravi Shanker Kumar. I think I am between 12 and 13 years old. My cousin was working in the loom and it was he, in fact, who told my uncle to go back to the village and talk to my parents so they could send me there. My parents came up to me and asked me if I wanted to go. I refused. The loom owner refused to take no for an answer, however. He paid them a sum of 500 rupees [$10] and then, they asked me to leave. Once he had paid the 500, the loom owner and I took off from the village.”
“The very first day I was made to sit at a loom. The loom owner made a little mark on the loom and gave me clear instructions to weave a carpet up to that mark itself. If I was unable to do so, I had to work under candlelight to reach that particular mark. Because I was made to work late night hours, I would never be able to sleep adequately in the night. The whole morning I would be weaving and I would only get some basic and half-cooked food at about 12:30 p.m. every day. I had to force myself to eat it.”
“In fact, things were so bad that once in a while, while I was working in the loom, my fingers would get cut and they would get nipped. Each time I got cut on my finger, I would go up to my boss’ wife and say, ‘Look, I’ve got a wound on my finger. Can you give me some medicine, some ointment you can give to me?’ The boss’ wife would not put any ointment for my wound. In fact, she would take a little bit of kerosene and put it in my wound and strike a match to it. That would hurt terribly. The wound would not heal, and we were made to go back and resume weaving again. Very often, because the wound was in raw condition, the blood would start oozing out of my finger. But we could not stop. With the blood running down my finger I was made to weave. Only when it became so bad that I could not possibly weave anymore, would I stop. And the moment I did stop, I was beaten up. There were two ways the loom owner would beat me up. With the stick of the loom, he would lift it up and beat me up with it. Or, there was a sharp instrument called a punja. He would use the wooden portion of that and beat me with it.”
“We were confined in one room and made to work for a period of 12 hours. Once in a day we could go and maybe use the bathroom, but the bathroom stops were limited in number. My father came to visit me once, he asked the loom owner to release me, but he refused: ‘until such time as the carpet is completed, I can’t let him leave because he’s the only one who knows the pattern.’ My father went away. That was it. That was the only time I spoke to my father.”
“I would think to myself, ‘There has to be something better.’ I would think of running away. But the thought of running away would always be followed with the fear of getting caught. If I did get caught I would be beaten up mercilessly. Therefore I never ran away. I was rescued in a raid operation conducted by Dajna Kurooji, a person who works in the Bal Vikas Ashram (BVA). He came in a raid and picked me up from there and took me to the ashram. I was very scared during the raid. I thought I was going to get beaten up again and get thrown away. I was terrified. The loom owner used to tell us, ‘If and when the police come, run, run away because they are going to be mean to you.’ The police official was smart enough to park the vehicle about three kilometers away from the loom and made his way in slowly. We were surprised because the crept up on us slowly. The kids were working on the loom. We didn’t have an option to run away.”
“The first day I came to the ashram, the other kids showed me around the place, where the bathing area was, where the bathroom was. I was fed a good meal and I went to sleep.”
https://www.endslaverynow.org/blog/articles/ravi-shanker-kumar
An example of a certification which is not intended to fight slavery, but which anti-slavery campaigners believe does reduce the risk of slavery, would be Organic certification.
Organic certification is intended to ensure certain environmental standards in the farming process. Some people buy Organic out of concern for the environment, some because of perceived health benefits, some out of concern for animal well-being.
Yet, in spite of not being intended to fight slavery, many anti-slavery activists believe that Organic food is less likely, comparatively speaking, to be made with slavery than food with no certifications of unknown origin.
One reason would be the inspections. Even though the organic inspector is not there to look for evidence of slavery, the fact that they are there at all gives them a chance to look around and notice if anything looks wrong. Slavery thrives in hidden places.
Another reason would be the higher prices an organic farmer is able to charge. This makes it easier for them to actually pay their employees instead of enslaving them.
Another is that pesticides are very dangerous to work with. Sometimes pesticides are even sprayed on fields while farmworkers are there, without warning. This can cause severe health effects. Many of the workers thus attacked are not enslaved and are free to leave after the attack, but it is still a form of workplace violence and makes the job more undesirable. The more undesirable a job is, the more likely some of the employers are to resort to slave labor to meet their demand for labor.
“In 2005, Schell surveyed laborers who worked for a grape tomato grower in northern Florida that season. Nearly one in four said they had been directly sprayed with pesticides or other chemicals. Just under half said they had encountered drift from nearby fields. Thirty-six percent said they had become sick or nauseous from pesticides, and more than four of 10 said they developed skin rashes or irritation.”
https://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/06/25/9159/farmworkers-plagued-pesticides-red-tape
Organic farms use a lot less pesticides, and are restricted on which ones they are allowed to use, so working on an organic farm is safer and more desirable than working on a non-organic one.
Thus, while Organic certification clearly is not intended to fight slavery, it still make sense for an anti-slavery activist to endorse Organic food as being less likely to contain slavery than uncertified food of mysterious origin.
“Minimum wage has a similar problem: the people at the very bottom end up unemployed with a wage of zero and then fully destitute. The people second rung from the bottom do well out of it, at the expense of the first group of people.”
The entire argument is only valid if people want to the jobs that are paying subminimum wage. If they do not want the jobs anyway, they do not benefit from being forced to take them. A subminimum wage job may literally pay subsistence, plus a lot of beatings, so they might be more destitute with the job than without it.
Rugmark is not forcibly dragging employees out of subminmum wage jobs they actually want. So it is not hurting the people who actually want subminimum wage work.
That is, unless you are prepared to argue, that these jobs are so beneficial to people, that they ought to be forced to take them whether they want them or not.
Under Indian law, freed slaves are entitled to rehabilitation payments. Since tax money collected from slaveholders rightfully belongs to the slaves anyway, it could be said that the Indian government is simply making a crude attempt at returning stolen money. (At least, when the funds are used for their intended purpose and not misspent by corrupt officials.)
“Staff from the Bal Vikas Ashram explained that as ex-slaves, Ashaf and the other boys had the right to certain benefits under Indian law. The benefits came in two ways: first, a lump sum of 20,000 rupees (about $450) was designed to help ex-slaves to get on their feet and have the basic necessities, and, second, a monthly payment of 200 rupees (about $4.50) was provided for children to help them stay in school. In Bochi these were significant amounts. At the ashram the freed boys had learned the power of cooperation and collective decision making. After careful thought, each of the twelve boys and his family used the first installment of the lump sum to buy a cow. Suddenly a village that had previously been without any real assets had a small herd producing milk for food and sale. A few months later, the boys’ families set up a milk cooperative, selling their surplus in bulk to a wholesaler, plowing the profits back into improving life in the village, and buying more cows. Ginny Baumann, the partnership director for Free the Slaves, told me that it was getting hard to move around the village for all the cows strolling around the village like big sleepy pets. The cows are treated with extreme courtesy by all the villagers, which is not surprising when you see the new clothes, tools, roofs, and increased food supplies that result from the cows’ milk production.” – Kevin Bales, Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves, page 215
Is it really the end of the world if people are actually paid so they can move on with their lives and do something they actually want to do? Or does making carpets as cheaply as possible take paramount importance, even if it means forcing people who would rather be raising cows to weave carpets instead?
Here’s another example of minimum wage campaigns within the garment industry, this time hiding under the cloak of a charity.
https://www.oxfam.org.au/2010/11/living-wage-project-bangladesh/
When I was growing up, Bangladesh was the absolute poorest country in the entire world. They had fought a war of independence, they shed a whole lot of human blood for the opportunity to at least collectively own the land under their feet. Part of the strategy in the (ultimately successful) guerrilla war was destroying economic infrastructure. The Indians then decided to step in and settle the matter in favour of Bengali independence.
Now I’m checking the GDP per capita PPP and in 1990 it was around $1300 USD, but in 2016 it was close to $3300 USD which is an average rate of real growth of about 4% per annum (better than many countries). It was not labour unions nor government aid that achieved this, it was allowing Bangladesh to use their main resource: cheap labour. The ILO and other groups are essentially labour unions promoting the idea of government central planning (i.e. socialism) which is a recipe for disaster, and we can point out empirically again and again it results in disaster. Just look at Venezuela or Cuba for nations that chose the central planning route and have achieved only greater poverty.
My needs are simple, I buy basic cheap clothing and if a trouser seam should split (seems to happen often as poor quality thread gets used) then I sit up that night stitching it back together, because I have to wake up and go to work in the morning. Am I obliged to spend more money? If I throw these trousers away and buy a new pair then those Green activists will call me “wasteful” and nag me for destroying the planet. If I mend them myself I’m apparently miserly and to blame for not spending enough.
I believe there’s no way for me to win with these guys… nothing will please them, they simply hate me for having something.
Thing is, I work hard, I pay my debts, I am indeed careful with my pennies and I refuse to apologize for any of that. I support private charity and I used to give to Oxfam, before that I used to give to Amnesty International. Well, AI chose to become gun grabbers, they decided to kick out Gita Sahgal when she mentioned that violent jihad was not something she wanted to support, and that some aspects of Islam were discriminatory toward women. In my mind, one of the most fundamental human rights is the right to speak your mind, and AI chose to deny Gita Sahgal that.
Oxfam are now behaving as political operatives, supporting unhelpful policies while taking money on the pretense of being simply a charity. I strongly dislike such duplicity.
Qatar has the highest per capita income in the world, and it still has a large amount of slavery. Brazil is considered to have a “booming economy”, but it still has a large amount of slavery, as well as many others who are in extreme poverty (making them vulnerable to slavery). A slave does not benefit from living in a country with a high GDP or a “booming economy”. Almost none of that wealth reaches them. (Generally speaking. Slavery is not defined by the lack of renumeration. However, due to their lack of choice in the matter, there is generally hardly any pay.) Slavery itself generates some amount of GDP, but just generating GDP doesn’t make something good or ethical.
Bangladesh also has a significant amount of slavery, not in the garment industry, so far as I know, but in the fish and shrimp industries. Slavery has a narrow definition though. There are workers in Bangladesh who are beaten by their employers, but are not technically classified as slaves because they could quit their jobs if they were willing to starve instead.
Whatever happened in Venezuala and Cuba, unless the death toll was in the millions, what happened in Congo to fuel the rise of the automobile industry was worse. Millions of Congolese were raped, killed, and/or enslaved so that people in Europe, North America, and Australia could have cars. Capitalism is a genocide economy, quite literally.
“rubber and ivory worth millions were arriving in Europe, but the ships going back carried little besides weapons, manacles, and luxury goods for the bosses. Nothing was going in to pay for what was coming out.” – Kevin Bales
https://longreads.com/2016/03/08/your-phone-was-made-by-slaves-a-primer-on-the-secret-economy/
If I understand GDP correctly, having more exports than imports is supposed to result in a high GDP, but this did the Congolese no good.
Minimizing wage costs is probably enslavers’ most common motive.
“Rather than pay, as an anonymous contributor to a newspaper put it in 1838, ‘wages to the highest rate competing capitalists can afford to give,’ employers will always look to minimize their wage bill and that means exerting control over others until the costs of such control exceeds the savings from lower wages. Enslaver employers, in other words, try to limit competitive labor agreements through a variety of strategies, including draconian labor contracts, limited suffrage or education for workers, debt-bondage, restrictions on land ownership, vagrancy and breach of contract laws, and even legal obligations to work for others (Quirk 2011: 122).” – Robert E. Wright
https://books.google.com/books?id=-gYpDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA74&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false
Here is how the Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines define slavery.
http://www.law.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofLaw/FileStore/Filetoupload,651854,en.pdf
And neither of us voted for Hillary. My associate voted for Jill Stein and I did not vote in the US elections. But here if it makes you happy is a video by Abby Martin about the Podesta e-mails.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fat63bqvG8
The Belgians actually took over the Congo after King Leopold, who was even worse.
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/congo-white-king-red-rubber-black-death/
Or if you don’t want to look at the documentary, you could look at this picture to get a general idea of what life in the Congo under King Leopold was like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#/media/File:MutilatedChildrenFromCongo.jpg
Or there is also this book by Adam Hochschild.
https://www.audible.com/pd/History/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Audiobook/B003UN4KV4
From Chapter 15 of King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild:
———
In population losses on this scale, the toll is usually a composite of figures from one or more of four closely connected sources: (1) murder; (2) starvation, exhaustion, and exposure; (3) disease; and (4) a plummeting birth rate. In the worst period in the Congo, the long rubber boom, it came in abundance from all four:
1. Murder. Although outright murder was not the major cause of death in Leopold’s Congo, it was most clearly documented. When a village or a district failed to supply its quota of rubber or fought back against the regime, Force Publique soldiers or rubber company “sentries” often killed everyone they could find. Those times when an eyewitness happened upon a pile of skeletons or severed hands, and a report survives, represent, of course, only a small proportion of the massacres carried out, only a few sparks from a firestorm. But among those scattered sparks are some that burn distinctly:
* In 1896, a German newspaper, the Kölnische Zeitung, published, on the authority of “a highly esteemed Belgian,” news that 1308 severed hands had been turned over to the notorious District Commissioner Léon Fiévez in a single day. The newspaper twice repeated the story without being challenged by the Congo state. Several additional reports of that day’s events, including some from both Protestant and Catholic missionaries, cited even higher totals for the number of hands. On a later occasion, Fiévez admitted that the practice of cutting hands off corpses existed; he denied only, with great vehemence, that he had ever ordered hands cut off living people.
* In 1899, a state officer, Simon Roi, perhaps not realizing that one of the people he was chatting with was an American missionary, bragged about the killing squads under his command. The missionary, Ellsworth Faris, recorded the conversation in his diary: “Each time the corporal goes out to get rubber, cartridges are given to him. He must bring back all not used; and for every one used he must bring back a right hand!…As to the extent to which this is carried on, [Roi] informed me that in six months they, the State, on the Momboyo River had used 6000 cartridges, which means that 6000 people are killed or mutilated. It means more than 6000, for the people have told me repeatedly that the soldiers kill children with the butt of their guns.”
* The punitive expeditions against the Budja rebels altogether killed more than thirteen hundred Budjas. Reports of this appeared in various Belgian newspapers in 1900, one of which was subsidized by the Congo state. Dozens of other rebellions against rubber-collecting broke out throughout the territory over the next decade. Estimating the death toll caused by suppressing them all is impossible, but sometimes a stray statistic carries appalling implications, when we remember that soldiers were severely punished for “wasting” bullets on nonhuman targets. Among a raft of revealing documents from the A.B.I.R. concession company that Morel got hold of is a register showing that in the year 1903, a single one of the thirty-five rubber-collecting posts in A.B.I.R. territory was sent a total of 159 firearms and 40,355 rounds of ammunition.
The list of specific massacres on record goes on and on. The territory was awash in corpses, sometimes literally. Where a river flows into Lake Tumba, wrote the Swedish missionary E. V Sjoblom, “I saw … dead bodies floating on the lake with the right hand cut off, and the officer told me when I came back why they had been killed. It was for the rubber…. When I crossed the stream I saw some dead bodies hanging down from the branches in the water. As I turned away my face at the horrible sight one of the native corporals who was following us down said, ‘Oh, that is nothing, a few days ago I returned from a fight, and I brought the white man 160 hands and they were thrown into the river.'” It was not only missionaries and visitors who recorded the mass murders. Many Force Publique officers kept astonishingly frank diaries about the death and destruction they left behind them.
* At the village of Bikoro on Lake Tumba, a Swedish officer of the Force Publique, Lieutenant Knut Svensson, may have been the cause of some of the mangled bodies his countryman Sjöblom had seen. Svensson noted in his diary a death toll of 527 people in four and a half months’ time, upon the imposition of the rubber regime in 1894–1895. (According to oral tradition in the area today, Svensson would assemble the people of a recalcitrant village, on the pretext of signing a treaty or recruiting porters, and then simply open fire.)
* The diary of another officer, Charles Lemaire, is chilling in its casualness: “28 March 1891:…The village of Bokanga was burned…. 4 April 1891: A stop at Bolébo…. Since they wanted to meet us only with spears and guns, the village was burned. One native killed…. 12 April 1891: Attack on the Ikengo villages…. The big chief Ekélé of Etchimanjindou was killed and thrown in the water…. 14 June 1891: Expedition against the Loliva who refuse to come to the station. Dreadful weather; attack made in driving rain. The group of villages was large; couldn’t destroy them all. Around 15 blacks killed…. 14 June 1891: At 5 A.M. sent the Zanzibari Metchoudi with about 40 men … to burn Nkolé…. The operation was successful and everything was burned…. 4 September 1891: At 4 A.M. preparations for attacking Ipéko…. The whole village was burned and the banana trees cut down…. 13 July 1892: The Bompopo villages were attacked 7 July by Lieutenant Sarrazijn; 20 natives killed; 13 women and children taken prisoner.”
* From the diary of Louis Leclercq, another Force Publique officer: “21 June 1895…. Arrived at Yambisi at 10:20 A.M. Village abandoned…. We sent several groups of soldiers to scour the area; they came back several hours later with 11 heads and 9 prisoners. A canoe sent out hunting in the evening also brought back several heads. 22 June 1895: They brought us three prisoners in the morning, three others towards evening, and three heads. A man from Baumaneh running through the forest shouting for his lost wife and child came too close to our camp and received a bullet from one of our sentries. They brought us his head. Never have I seen such an expression of despair, of fear…. We burned the village.”
The diaries of Lemaire and Leclercq—and others—go on in this vein for day after day, week after week.
Resistance of any kind, or even cutting corners, was fatal. E. D. Morel reprinted a message that a district commissioner, Jules Jacques,* sent to one of his underlings after finding that some villagers had severed vines, killing them, to extract the rubber, instead of merely tapping the vines as they were supposed to: “M. le Chef de Poste. Decidedly these people of [Inongo] are a bad lot. They have just been and cut some rubber vines…. We must fight them until their absolute submission has been obtained, or their complete extermination…. Inform the natives that if they cut another single vine, I will exterminate them to the last man.”
Conrad was not making much up when he had Mr. Kurtz scrawl the infamous line “Exterminate all the brutes!”
2. Starvation, exhaustion, and exposure. As news of the terror spread, hundreds of thousands of people fled their villages. In retaliation, soldiers often took their animals and burned their huts and crops, leaving them no food. This pattern of action was established even before the rubber boom, when Leopold’s soldiers were looking primarily for ivory and for porters and food for themselves. A Swedish lieutenant describes such a raid in 1885 in the lower Congo rapids district: “When we were approaching there was a terrible tumult in the village. The natives … were completely taken with surprise. We could see them gather what they could of their belongings and escape into the deep thick woods…. Before I left the place I had the village plundered of the large number of goats, hens and ducks that were there…. Then we abandoned the village and retired to a better place for our noon rest.”
As they fled these expeditions, villagers sometimes abandoned small children for fear that their cries would give away their hiding places. As a result, many children starved. A small proportion of the population, lucky enough to live near the Congo’s borders, escaped from the country. Some thirty thousand refugees, the French colonial governor estimated, had crossed into French territory by 1900. Others fled to British territory, although a number of them drowned in the Luapula River, which formed part of the border with British-owned Northern Rhodesia. But for most people there was nowhere to flee except deep into the rain forest or the swamps, where there was no shelter and little food. The American soldier of fortune Edgar Canisius saw refugees from his scorched-earth raids “living like wild beasts in the forest, subsisting on roots, and ants and other insects.” A fellow Presbyterian missionary of William Sheppard’s wrote, in 1899, “All the people of the villages run away to the forest when they hear the State officers are coming. To-night, in the midst of the rainy season, within a radius of 75 miles of Luebo, I am sure it would be a low estimate to say that 40,000 people, men, women, children, with the sick, are sleeping in the forests without shelter.”
Around the same time, a young English explorer named Ewart’S. Grogan walked the length of Africa and was shocked at what he saw in crossing a “depopulated and devastated” 3000-square-mile tract in the far northeastern part of the Congo: “Every village has been burnt to the ground, and as I fled from the country I saw skeletons, skeletons everywhere; and such postures—what tales of horror they told!”
Hunger also struck villagers who did not flee into the forest, because if they were near a rubber post they had to give up much of their bananas, manioc, fish, and meat to feed the soldiers. The village of Bumba in the A.B.I.R. concession, for example, had only a hundred families, but it was expected each month to deliver fifteen kilos of yams or similar vegetables, in addition to five pigs or fifty chickens. Furthermore, villages like this one usually had to come up with all the food while their able-bodied men were in the forest, desperately searching for rubber. Without the manpower to clear new garden plots, so essential in farming the fragile soil of the rain forest, the women often replanted worn-out fields. Harvests declined, and in the old A.B.I.R. region the period is remembered today as lonkali, the time of famine.
Untold thousands of people, women, children, and the elderly, died as hostages. Soldiers kept them in dirt compounds, often in chains, feeding them little or nothing until the men of a village brought in the demanded amount of rubber—something that might take weeks. In one stockade in 1899, prisoners were found to be dying at the rate of three to ten a day.
3. Disease. As with the decimation of the American Indians, disease killed many more Congolese than did bullets. Europeans and the Afro-Arab slave-traders brought to the interior of the Congo many diseases previously not known there. The local people had no time to build up immunities—as they largely had to malaria, for instance. Both new illnesses and old ones spread rapidly, because huge numbers of Congolese were now forced to travel long distances: as men conscripted to be long-haul porters or to work as steamboat crews (a large boat required from twenty to sixty woodcutters) or as soldiers impressed into the Force Publique. The most notorious killers were smallpox and sleeping sickness, although less dramatic lung and intestinal infections also took a high toll.
Smallpox had been endemic in parts of coastal Africa for centuries, but the great population movements of the imperial age spread the illness throughout the interior, leaving village after village full of dead bodies. A Kuba king—the successor to the one who had welcomed William Sheppard to the kingdom—died from the disease. Smallpox inspired a particular terror. The Africans called it “the sickness from above” or “the sickness of heaven,” because the terrifying disease seemed to come from no familiar source. One traveler to the Congo came on a deserted town where a fifteen-foot boa constrictor was dining on smallpox victims’ flesh, and on another where the vultures were so gorged that they were too heavy to fly.
Sleeping sickness also spread lethally up the rivers. Half a million Congolese were estimated to have died of it in 1901 alone. The disease is caused by a parasite first spread by the bite of the pink-striped tsetse fly, about the size of a horsefly, with a distinctive high-pitched buzz. Once contracted by humans, sleeping sickness becomes highly contagious. It can cause fever, swelling of the lymph glands, a strange craving for meat, and a sensitivity to cold. At last comes the immense lethargy that gives the illness its name.
Faced with undeniable evidence of massive population loss, Leopold’s apologists, then and now, blame sleeping sickness. And it is true that sleeping sickness and the other diseases would doubtless have taken many lives even if the Congo had come into the twentieth century under a regime other than Leopold’s. But the story is more complicated, for disease rarely acts by itself alone. Epidemics almost always take a drastically higher and more rapid toll among the malnourished and the traumatized: the Nazis and Soviets needed no poison gas or firing squads to finish off many of those who died in their camps. Today, thanks in part to our century of famines and barbed wire, epidemiologists understand all too well the exact mechanisms by which this happens. Even in the Congo, one did not have to be a physician to see that those who were dying of disease were not dying of disease alone. Charles Gréban de Saint-Germain, a magistrate at Stanley Falls, wrote in 1905: “Disease powerfully ravages an exhausted population, and it’s to this cause, in my opinion, that we must attribute the unceasing growth of sleeping sickness in this region; along with porterage and the absence of food supplies, it will quickly decimate this country. I’ve seen nowhere in the Congo as sad a spectacle as that along the road from Kasongo to Kabambare. The villages for the most part have few people in them; many huts are in ruins; men, like women and children, are thin, weak, without life, very sick, stretched out inert, and above all there’s no food.”
4. Plummeting birth rate. Not surprisingly, when men were sent into the forest in search of rubber for weeks at a time, year after year, and women were held hostage and half-starved, fewer children were born. A Catholic missionary who worked for many years in the Lake Mai Ndombe district, a major rubber area, noticed this pattern. When he arrived, in 1910, he was surprised by the almost total absence of children between the ages of seven and fourteen, although there were many of other ages. This pinpoints the period from 1896 to 1903—just when the rubber campaign was at its height in the district. A witness in a nearby area at that very time was Roger Casement, on his investigative trip. He estimated that the population had dropped by 60 percent and wrote that “the remnant of the inhabitants are only now, in many cases, returning to their destroyed or abandoned villages…. A lower percentage of births lessen[s] the population…. Women refuse to bear children, and take means to save themselves from motherhood. They give as the reason that if ‘war’ should come to a woman ‘big with child’ or with a baby to carry, ‘she’ cannot well run away and hide from the soldiers.” Part of the population loss in the Congo resulted, then, when families, terrorized and torn apart by the rubber campaign, simply stopped having children.
No territory-wide census was taken in the Congo until long after the rubber terror was over. But Daniel Vangroenweghe, a Belgian anthropologist who worked in a former rubber area in the 1970s, found persuasive demographic evidence that large numbers of men had been worked to death as rubber slaves or killed in punitive raids—and he discovered the evidence in the regime’s own statistics. No other explanation accounts for the curious pattern that threads through the village-by-village headcounts taken in the colony long before the first territorial census. These local headcounts consistently show far more women than men.
At Inongo in 1907, for example, there were 309 children, 402 adult women, but only 275 adult men. (This was the very town for which, some ten years earlier, the district commissioner had ordered “absolute submission … or … complete extermination.”) At nearby Iboko in 1908 there were 322 children, 543 adult women, but only 262 adult men. Statistics from numerous other villages show the same pattern. Sifting such figures today is like sifting the ruins of an Auschwitz crematorium. They do not tell you precise death tolls, but they reek of mass murder.
During Leopold’s rule, by how much, from all four causes, did the Congo population shrink? Just as when historians chart population loss from the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe, they can be more confident of the percentage than they are of absolute numbers. They have, after all, no census data. Interestingly, some estimates of population loss in the Congo made by those who saw it firsthand agree with some of those made by more scientific methods today.
An official Belgian government commission in 1919 estimated that from the time Stanley began laying the foundation of Leopold’s state, the population of the territory had “been reduced by half.” Major Charles C. Liebrechts, a top executive of the Congo state administration for most of its existence, arrived at the same estimate in 1920. The most authoritative judgment today comes from Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and perhaps the greatest living ethnographer of Congo basin peoples. He bases his calculations on “innumerable local sources from different areas: priests noticing their flocks were shrinking, oral traditions, genealogies, and much more.” His estimate is the same: between 1880 and 1920, the population of the Congo was cut “by at least a half.”
Half of what? Only in the 1920s were the first attempts made at a territory-wide census. In 1924 the population was reckoned at ten million, a figure confirmed by later counts. This would mean, according to the estimates, that during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million people.
“Nor is it possible to answer fully a larger question: how much profit altogether did the king draw from the Congo in his lifetime? In answer to this question, the Belgian scholar Jules Marchal, the leading historian of this period, makes a “conservative” estimate, not including some smaller or hard-to-trace sources of money, of 220 million francs of the time, or $1.1 billion in today’s dollars.” – Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, Chapter 18
So would you be willing to “not support” all the profit that was made by the use of slave labor in the Congo? This would include the rubber for a lot of cars, cobalt used in color televisions and military equipment, a lot of raw materials for electronics, radioactive materials for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, etc?
“On 14 July 1919, Jean Jadot announced in Brussels that Union Miniere had produced 85,000 tonnes of copper during the war. He forgot to compliment Preston Horner, the main architect of this feat. He added that the company was paying out its first dividends: 150 Francs per share. At that time the total number of shares was 250,000, comprising 125,000 capital shares and the same number of dividend shares. The company paid out 37.5 million Francs in profits. In other words, each 100-Franc capital share earned 300 Franks.”
This is disgusting. Some talented accountant should track down those Francs and try to figure out how they can be returned to the Congolese without them winding up in the hands of the crime lords who are still enslaving people in that region.
Bangladesh has a lot of slavery in their shrimp industry.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-hunger-for-shrimp-and-slavery-destroy-mangroves-excerpt/
The book goes into a lot more depth than that excerpt.
Shrimp and also fish.
“It was cold. We were always cold and wet. My clothes would be soaked from wading into the water to the boats, and the fish guts were everywhere, splashing onto us as we cut them open. We sat on the wet ground all night. If we slowed down or stopped the boss would hit us, if we weren’t moving fast when we hung the fish on the racks he’d hit us with a long stick he carried. All the time he’d yell at us, calling us filthy names. Some boats brought their catch at night, others just at dawn. Often we’d have to work twenty-four hours straight. Maybe we’d be able to snatch a little sleep. The boss made us keep going as long as there were fish to clean and hang on the racks. The longer I worked, I’d get exhausted and clumsy. Sometimes I’d cut myself with the gutting knife or slip and fall from the drying rack. If you were cut or hurt, you had to keep working. Whenever I made a mistake, the boss would hit me.” – Blood and Earth, pages 72-73
The problem is not that there are any countries we know of that still formally have a head tax. The problem is that Bob Murphy is advocating for a head tax. From his IER article,
“But it should be clear that just focusing on conventional economic output, raising $2 trillion through a lump sum head tax would impose much less drag than raising the same amount of revenue via a tax narrowly targeted to the carbon-intensive segment of the economy.”
All this so that rich people can get huge subsidies.
“Internationally, governments provide at least $775 billion to $1 trillion annually in subsidies, not including other costs of fossil fuels related to climate change, environmental impacts, military conflicts and spending, and health impacts.”
http://priceofoil.org/fossil-fuel-subsidies/
So apparently, libertarianism is about enslaving the poor to subsidize the rich.
“So apparently, libertarianism is about enslaving the poor to subsidize the rich.”
Dang, you caught us, and after we hid it so well.
If only you did hide it better. Please hide it better. Bob Murphy going on about how much better he thinks a head tax would be is way too obvious. (Head tax being, according to him, “a flat ‘head tax’ that divides the burden evenly across all American taxpayers,” which isn’t possible without slavery unless the head tax is literally $0 or less.)
OK, at our next secret meeting where we discuss our love of slavery and hatred of the poor, I’ll be sure to tell everyone that we need to hide our intentions better because some random person who periodically comments on obscure blogs is on to us.
Not even peaceful rich people.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/03/ogoni-king-shell-oil-is-killing-my-people
More about how head taxes cause slavery.
Select excerpts from a report by Dr. Raingeard, as printed on pages 121-128 of Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts by Jules Marchal.
“When a native, remarkably enough, managed to resist the threats and blows of the merchants, I have seen government officers offering him the choice between signing a contract and prison.”
“Suppose we leave to one side the legitimacy of a tax which benefits only Europeans and presents the blacks with no compensatory advantages. This tax, which is sometimes equivalent to two or three month’s work, ought to replace corvees in kind, it used to be said; in reality, the two co-exist, and the natives have now to bear the burden of both a tax in money and a tax in kind.”
“By law old men and adolescents of less than sixteen years old are exempt from taxation. In practice, as I have many times observed in Mushuni and Mombanda circles, 80% of old men and 40% of children pay.”
“It is of course the case that when an entire population is put to work, in a manner harmful to its very existence, it cannon be a question of voluntary labour.”
“Entering into the agreement, and then honoring the contract are enforced by means of prison and the chicotte, which are generously administered by government officers, who have been reduced to acting as labor recruiters and as guards supervising convicts on behalf of the companies.”
“Those who do not die at the trading post return to their villages as walking skeletons.”
“They work from six in the morning to six in the evening without a moment’s rest, even in the very middle of the day.”
“Some posts boast of file houses built of half-crumbling adobe, 4 metres by 3 or 4 metres, in which 15, 20 or 25 natives are piled on top of one another. Other managers settle for allowing the new arrivals to build straw huts, outside of work hours of course. In these huts, which are 1.50 metres high, the blacks sleep one on top of the other. In Dunda I saw five in the same bed, which was 1.20 metres long and 0.80 metres wide.”
“Two days later the porters asked for were paraded in front of him, old men, invalids and women, with ropes around their necks.”
“Sanitary conditions are lamentable. Sleeping sickness ravages the local population.”
More on the effects of head taxes.
From a report by Winand Claessens, the Inspector of Trade and Industry, as quoted by Jules Marchal on page 49 of Forced Labor in the Gold & Copper Mines: A History of Congo under Belgian Rule, 1910-1945. We do not agree with the opinions of Claessens and are quoting this simply as evidence.
“Conditions of the camp: Good. The only criticism that can be levelled at Robert Williams & Co., the camp manager, is the lack of drinking water. This has been mentioned repeatedly. Only one pipe brings water to this camp. Workers have to queue for hours to get a little water from it. So the overwhelming majority fetch stagnant water, unfit for drinking, from hollows in dry valleys. It is up to the Health Department to determine if the numerous cases of enteritis, dysentery and pneumonia that were registered during the desertions, and in part motivated them, were related to this water.”
“There were a score of deaths between 15 September and 15 October. No doubt the unhealthy conditions, coupled with the mine’s notoriously high accident rate, had an impact on desertions, of which there were 27 in July, 26 in August, 21 in September, and 26 in October.”
“Complaints lodged by the 17 men I talked to are not to be taken seriously: ‘The work is too hard; the Europeans punch and kick us, etc.’ Of course mine work is tiring. Natives are forced to do it under the lash. Mining operations would be impossible if they depended on the good will of natives.”
“A lot of deserters abscond from hospital. They are scared of the European doctor, and have no faith in the effectiveness of his remedies.”
Head taxes cause lots of deaths.
“Tallying up mortality figures at Union Miniere cited in this and preceding chapters (300 in 1912, 720 in 1914-15, 500 in 1916, 420 in 1917, 1,307 in 1918), we get a total of 4,247 deaths at the camps over the six-year period from 1913 to 1918. To this must be added the large number of those who died of illness after running away, or on their way home to their villages after being sent home sick or handicapped. If we add to this the number of deaths from the period before 1913, we can estimate deaths of this nature at about 1,700, making a total mortality figure of 5,000 from the founding of Union Miniere. As for the number of deserters from Union Miniere at the time of the Spanish fle outbreak who might have died soon after, that total is anyone’s guess.” – Jules Marchal, Forced Labor in the Gold & Copper Mines: A History of Congo under Belgian Rule, 1910-1945, pages 77-78
Punishments for failing to pay head taxes.
“We have just seen, incidentally, that Henry, in a telegram to Maertens, advised the district commissioner to collect taxes, rigorously, as a means of boosting labor recruitment. Africans who fell behind in their payments were, in the euphemism for imprisonment used then, ‘put under bodily constraint’ for at least two months. As late as 1918, those thus ‘constrained’ were so many that Governor-General Henry planned to use them as porters on such major routes as the 700-kilometer Ituri road.” – Jules Marchal, Forced Labor in the Gold & Copper Mines: A History of Congo under Belgian Rule, 1910-1945, page 243
Head taxes were also responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Delighted executives called it un scandale geologique—a ‘geological scandal’—and built an empire of mills, furnaces, and rails in the bush. Locals were paid the equivalent of 20 cents a day to break rocks and push carts. It amounted to a version of debt slavery: Taxes were kept purposefully high, and workers were not permitted to select their own occupations. The men slept eight to a hut in settlements ringed with barbed wire to prevent them from leaving before their contracts were up. Typhoid and dysentery were rampant, and about one miner out of every ten died every year from disease, malnutrition, rock collapses, or beatings administered by the Belgian managers. ‘The food of the workers is awful,’ reported one observer. ‘They are only fed during the week with flour or corn.’ One of these sites had been Shinkolobwe, where patches of high-grade uranium had been found in 1915.” – Tom Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, pages 4-5
“The mine would go on to supply nearly two-thirds of the uranium used in the bomb dropped over Hiroshima, and much of the related product plutonium that went into the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The pit was deepened and widened, and the ebony vein of uranium would go on to feed the massive American buildup of nuclear weapons after the war.” – Tom Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, page 6
Anonymous,
Can you elaborate on some of the reasons that head taxes are sub-optimal ? Some examples might help..
If you set the head tax at, say, $50,000 per year per person, then anyone who can’t afford to pay that for whatever reason, like if they only earn $10,000 per year or if they live by farming and barter, can be subjected to whatever the penalties are for not paying. The only real reason to tax people more than they are earning is to force them to take jobs they do not want, i.e. to enslave them. So the government sets up the head tax, and then goes around arresting people who can’t afford to pay it and handing them to corporations who are willing to pay.
Since the Congo had a barter economy, there were many people who were not earning the required amount of money and who were thus legally eligible for enslavement.
Since they were being forced into these jobs against their will, they were not able to negotiate desirable terms. So what they were paid was not enough to compensate them for the loss of food and other things they had been able to earn by farming and bartering before. They were also unable to leave without fear of being hunted down if their bosses beat and whipped them or whatever. To maintain the illusion of the jobs being voluntary, they were forced to sign contracts, though the employee’s obligations under these contracts were enforced by prison and the chicotte, a type of whip.
Since taking people away from their farms resulting in a great reduction in food supply and a lot of starvation and disease, they would up forcing people to grow food for the mines and whatnot as well, for less pay than what it would have cost to persuade them to grow those quantities of food voluntarily.
All this greatly benefited the Belgian government and the corporations they favored, at the expense of the Congolese people and of competitors who did not resort to such atrocious wealth-making tactics.
On pages 298-299 of Forced Labor in the Gold & Copper Mines: A History of Congo under Belgian Rule by Jules Marchal, there are actually whipping tables from some state-owned gold mines. They actually kept records of whipping their employees. 2nd Quarter 1920: 15,106 lashes.
If the fact that slavery is incredibly immoral is not reason enough, the basic economic argument against slavery is laid out by Robert E. Wright.
“As a work of history, this book is deeply rooted in the past, even delving into prehistory, and describes change over time. One thing that has not changed, however, is the fact that always and everywhere, slavery hurts the overall economy. I consider that thesis an empirical regularity rather than a universal truth or law and lay no claims to its novelty. It is an important claim nevertheless, because slavery’s effect on the overall economy has too often been conflated with its effects on enslavers’ profits or its efficiency (total output per unit of input) compared to other labor systems. They are not the same economic phenomena. Most importantly, profits and efficiency do not necessarily lead to growth and development, which are what ultimately matter to human comfort and longevity (“happiness” in the older, Jeffersonian sense of the term). As political scientist Joel Quirk argues, organizing the economy around free labor may be advantageous overall but individual employers may nevertheless prefer other types of laborers. Quirk’s claim that economic tools for understanding and evaluating different labor regimes are limited, however, requires rethinking. Negative externalities, or costs imposed by enslavement not accounted for in the market for slaves, explain why private profits and even economic efficiency do not add up to economic output.”
https://books.google.com/books?id=-gYpDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA2&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false
Robert E. Wright goes on in his book to give numerous examples of the types of externalities that slavery has been observed to generate. However, a very obvious example is torture. Torture can be understood as a form of negative wealth. This is one reason that slaves often receive a negative income.
Slavery is not defined by torture. It is defined by the lack of free movement/free will. That is, the slave cannot leave without incurring risks of violence. However, not being able to leave frequently results in slaveholders getting away with torture that might cause a non-slave worker to quit their job. There are some non-slaves who are tortured by their employers. The difference is that they apparently value the food and any other compensation more than they fear the torture, whereas a slave cannot leave even if he does not not consider food to be adequate compensation for the torture. A slave might be able to get more and better food (and other compensation) elsewhere if released but is not allowed to do so. Thus the slave is receiving negative wages.
In the case of slavery, we observe that the torture and other negative externalities generated are greater than the amount of profit generated. So although Union Miniere and other slaveholding companies profited off of head tax and other forms of slavery, they still caused a net loss in the world overall.
However, even if you could find an example of slavery that was not a net loss to the world overall, it would still be incredibly immoral.
This is also from Robert E. Wright.
“What use will freedom be to me? Can it give me back my children, or make me what I used to be” (Stowe 1852: 301)? The decision to capture a slave, whether by force or by subterfuge, takes into account only two variables, the cost of capture and transportation on the one hand and the market price on the other. Slave raiders and recruiters do not account for the negative effects on the slaves themselves, the slaves’ children, or the slaves’ place of origin. All those costs, therefore, are negative externalities (Manning 1990: 21).”
“In a recent economic model devised by Acemoglu and Wolitzky, “coercion always reduces (utilitarian) social welfare, because … coercion hurts the agent[i.e., the enslaved] more than the additional effort it induces helps the principal [i.e., the enslaver]” (2011: 587). That is a fancy way of saying what Henry George meant over a century ago, when he argued that “the enslavement of part of their number could not increase the wealth of a people, for more than the enslavers gained the enslaved would lose” (Steele 1987: 373).”
“Readers are likely already convinced that enslavement is not good for the enslaved but they may not fully understand the extent and permanence of the damage. Enslavers’ monopsony power means that slaves receive much less for their labor than they would where competitive wages prevailed. That exploitation ends with freedom. But the damage inflicted on the enslaved to induce him or her to toil almost completely in the interests of the enslaver is usually extensive. Slaves usually suffer, as Bales and Soodalter put it, from confusion, depression, exhaustion, fear, hunger, injury, and shame (2009: 24). Much of the damage inflicted on the enslaved is permanent, persisting even if the slave eventually finds freedom. Survivors, philosophers Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzl explained, pay the cost of slavery for the rest of their lives (2007: 3).”
https://books.google.com/books?id=-gYpDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA145&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false
The records of whippings recorded were for those workers classified as “full time”. There were also workers classified as “part time” which is some kind of euphemism, so total whippings were actually higher than those on the tables.
Acting as if opposition to people being forced to work for sub-zero wages against their will automatically equates to support for minimum wages laws is like acting as if opposition to spousal murder automatically equates to opposition to the institution of marriage. Y’all would be ridiculous if it was not so sickening.