OK, one substantive post before I take off for the weekend.

Nick Kristof at the Times wrote a good one this week. Here’s the basic argument:

Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.

Talk to these families in the [garbage] dump, and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children.

In the past ten years, I have helped a whole lot of foreign companies set up shop over here in China. This doesn’t exactly win me a lot of friends among the Lefty crowd, folks that I agree with on most issues. No, I am an enabler of the seedy side of free trade, allowing multinationals to rape and pillage with abandon.

I have attempted to counter that argument on numerous occasions, bringing up examples of how my clients have gone into suburban and rural communities and brought jobs and a rise in the living standard. I have explained how these companies bring modern technology, some including safer and cleaner equipment.

There are also some "bad" companies out there, and because of them and the annual horror stories about factory conditions, my anecdotal evidence gets thrown out the window.

However, it is nice to know that a well-known and respected Lefty like Kristof, who is perhaps best known these days on his reporting of the situation in Darfur and other parts of Africa, is telling it straight and tying this issue into the real danger of increased protectionism in the U.S. A lot of this protectionism is about trying to save U.S. jobs, but there is also a substantial political movement on the U.S. Left whose objections rest on the issue of labor standards.

Kristof really nails my position on this, and although you should read his entire column, this sums it up for me:

I’m glad that many Americans are repulsed by the idea of importing products made by barely paid, barely legal workers in dangerous factories. Yet sweatshops are only a symptom of poverty, not a cause, and banning them closes off one route out of poverty. At a time of tremendous economic distress and protectionist pressures, there’s a special danger that tighter labor standards will be used as an excuse to curb trade.

When I defend sweatshops, people always ask me: But would you want to work in a sweatshop? No, of course not. But I would want even less to pull a rickshaw. In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn’t the bottom.

My views on sweatshops are shaped by years living in East Asia, watching as living standards soared — including those in my wife’s ancestral village in southern China — because of sweatshop jobs.