This is a brutal book, wriitten with an ideological bias - justifying working conditions that keep the poor deeper in poverty and personal distress - making the pockets of their employers (many from rich countries like our own) rich in cash.
The book shows graphically how far an advocate of Free Market Economics will go to hide the brutality of the Free Market and the ingrained insensiivity to inhuman conditions of employment and personal suffering. It is clear from this book that, once an economic bias takes hold, someone like Benjamin Powell will go to any lengths to justify the victims of that bias,.
The book reminds me of the attempts of King Leopold II of Belgium, at the turn of the 20th century, to prove to Europe, America and the Catholic Church that massive slave labor in Belgium Congo did not exist and that the claim was the plot of Protestant missionaries to undermine and discredit the work of Catholic missionaries in the Congo. Five million African slaves died under Belgium's inhumanity - and Leopold and Belgium became rich in the process.
Benjamin Powell is well-known for his association with the Acton Institute, and as an advocate of Austrian Economics, which emerged in Austria after the collapse of the Austro-Humgarian Empire. It was a mild attempt to create an aristocracy of moneyed entrepreneurs to replace the aristocracy of blood. It failed in Austria and so was transplanted to the United States in the persons of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.
That torch was taken up by the Acton Institute in the person of Father Robert Sirico - and a host of others - in 1991 to establish a moneyed aristocracy in the United States under the flag of "Free Market Economics" - - which is 'free" only for the Free Marketeers themselves. They are not happy with the Capitalism regulated by law (and Supreme Court mandate) in these United States. This book by Benjamin Powell is an extension of their Free Market Economics to the Third World, where the effects of a Free Market have kept millions in poverty and social degradation - sometimes little more than slaves of their economic masters.
Shantytowns and sweatshops are not steps on the way to progress. They are the evil and cruel effects of Free Market Economics, vividly portrayed in a recent book called "Breaker Boys"
by Michael Burgan. An even more vivid portrait is " How the Other Half Lives" by Jacob Riis, recently re-published.
Notice the sub-title: "Sweatshops in the Global Economy", with "statistics" to "prove" that sweatshops work for the financial advantage of the workers and that the sweatshops existence is a benefit to those caught in its tentacles. It sounds like Marx and Lenin vaunting the advantages of life under economic determinism - "advantages" often ending in the gulag,.
""Out of Poverty" is a disgrace to the Science of Economics, and the politics that go with it. Sweatshops have never improved the economic condition of anyone, as any visitor to underdeveloped countries know. "Don';t Cry For Me, Argentina" is not the theme song of the liberated poor from the shackles of poverty and social helplessness. We all know where that cry is coming from and the sheer inhumanity and cruelty of that period of Argentine history.
By this book, Benjamin Powell joins the company of Simon Legree and the cast of characters in Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist", "Hard Times" and Nicholas Nickleby". Sweatshops serve the economy of the entrepreneurs who run them and no amount of Austrian Economics will give respectability to one of the most massive social evils to inflict developing nations. It's a rich man's plaint on the poverty of sweatshops, giving them a twist that makes him comfortable with his own pocketbook.
Father Clifford Stevens
Archdiocese of Omaha
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Emmet McNamee
Oversimplistic and hgihly ideological
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 16, 2020
