If I find time during the next few days, I’ll address several of the excellent comments on my recent post on Wal-Mart and Slavery. In the meantime, I mention also my suspicion that slave-labor is less likely than is free labor to be used according to each worker’s comparative advantage. If my suspicion is correct, the division of labor within industrial factories, and across different manufacturing industries, will be less productive when labor is enslaved than when it is free.
I also draw your attention to the insightful Tim Worstall’s blog post that relates directly to this issue: slave owners don’t raise their slave-workers’ wages so significantly as this!
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'Insightful'? Good grief, that's a bit strong isn't it?
Personally I'd go with 'reads The Economist and can draw inferences' but no further.
Kudos for the Chinese people but they're being ripped off as long as the exchange rate is being pegged. Exchange rate manipulation is just plain old zero-sum tyranny.
Slave wages? No, funny money:
"A dollar spent in China buys almost five times more goods and services than a dollar spent in a typical American city like Indianapolis. Taking purchasing-power parity into account, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency estimates that China's economy looks more like one with a GDP of $6.6 trillion. Put another way, it makes more sense to think of China's economy as closer to two-thirds the size of the U.S. economy than to one-seventh."
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20050301/china.html
So, yes, the "Chinese people" are being "ripped off" in their ability to buy IMPORTS… but since the Chinese are making everything and their internal pricing is considerably different from their international currency exchange, "slavery" or "slave wages" are probably not appropriate terms.
They are more likely "unwitting participants" in China's effort to undermine the industrial and technological advantages of the West. This is a long-term political strategy that is implemented through economic manipulation.
What foreign products do Chinese consumers purchase? Or are most imports like the recent Airbus buy? Since China is a communist country (hightly controlled) are export free and imports controlled? Is China a mercantile state?