My question was simple...is it ethical to exploit desperate people. Even if these people voluntrarly amd free willungly accets the sweathop jobs. Yes or no?
Is it ethical to deny people employment opportunities to maintain protectionist trade relations? Is it ethical to exploit the consumer by only allowing them to buy local produce, at greater expense.
Or should we separate ethics and economics and address them individually?
Those examples arent issues of ethics. I would say things like child labor laws, workers rights are issues of ethics.
Thats why i don't buy the libertarian ideal of "free market is always right". They ignore the existence of power in reality . Libertarians can say people cant be exploited because free will. Common sense says the opposite. People get scammed or exploited all the time.
If thats your point of view, then I don't really think you understand what "ethics" are. Certainly you've missed that different people hold different ethical views and value assign them different values and priorities. You apparently hold child labour in far off lands paramount, another might find employment of local population has greater importance. The question you pose isn't simple "yes/no", though most would answer "no" to exploitation there are other factors. Someone might prefer that there isn't child labour in a far off land, but wants to cloth their child or earn a wage, which trumps their objection to sweatshops.
Also, a libertarian view on the "free market is right" is from the point of view of economics. Not ethics. This illustrates perfectly my point that they should be separated.
No my argument is regulations enable free trade. I argue against the libertarian position that the free market (unregulated) is always right.
You cant separate business from ethics. Impossible. To think so is naive or delusional.
If I want to argue child labor from an economics point. I can just compare economic performance of places that regulate child labor and places that don't.
The problem I have w libertarian ideology is that it is disconnected from reality. I reject the idea that free will means exploitation is not possible. If you make a contract w a child and he has free will to agree. Do you think our laws shoukd honor that agreement? This is what im talking about. Not whether some poor family in Bangladesh needs their kids to go to work and pitch in. The only reason I brought up child labor is to show that not all trades are symmetric. In reality a lot of trades are assymetrical due to power relationships. This is why we need regulations.