Abolishing sweatshops would hurt the poor

So I've been banned from Hensley's channel, so I have to conduct this conversation here.

If I can, Shoot 06 said, "What's wrong with prostitution in the industrialized world?"

Hemsley replied, "It's fed by women from the poorest parts of the world because women with more options don't do it."

I said, "And you're advocating removing one of the few options open to desperate women? Exactly how do you believe that helps them?"

Hemsley said, "Yeah, we should let sweatshops be legal too because they help desperate people."

I think he was being sarcastic. I said, "Correct, yes, they do, and despite our distaste for them, removing that option hurts people rather than helps them."

M Hensley said, "Oh, off you fascist! You're getting cheap shit by using slave labor; does not help them. You ask, um..."

And then he blocked me.

So, just a definitional point to start with: a sweatshop is a place of work, usually in the developing world. According to current Western standards, working conditions in sweatshops are bad, and the wage of sweatshop workers is low.

Slavery is the claim to ownership of a person; it's enforced by using force to prevent the person from leaving. So, sweatshops are not examples of slavery since people choose to work in them. They can choose to stop working in them, and force will not be used to prevent them from leaving.

M Hensley believes that actions should be evaluated solely on the basis of their effect on society as a whole. Hensley apparently believes that eliminating sweatshops would somehow help society. I think the portion of society that M Hensley would particularly like to help are workers.

Yet, abolishing sweatshops would actually hurt workers, and we can demonstrate this very simply.

So, what jobs are currently staffed? That is, we know that people have demonstrated a preference to work in sweatshops over the alternative futures they saw for themselves. From this, we can infer that of the choices open to any sweatshop worker, they judged working in a sweatshop to be the option that helped them the most—the option that was least objectionable. They preferred working in a sweatshop to the alternatives.

And since we don't like the idea of working in a sweatshop ourselves, we can get a sense of just how undesirable the rejected alternatives must have been.

By eliminating sweatshops, you remove one of the options available to the world's poorest people. You effectively say, "Because I don't think people should work in sweatshops, you must now choose an even less desirable cost for your future."

This is inexcusably arrogant paternalism that hurts exactly those people who it professes to want to help.