Current failings of our world are not excuses not to improve it, or to be better people.

On another note, a personal attack is not appreciated here, regardless of where I work. Your comment history is rich with these types of things. We are happy to have you here, but please think about contributing more constructively.

Concretely, if an iPhone is replaced on average every other year but goes up 30% to the the ePhone (ethical phone) it is now only replaced every 3 years. This means fewer ephones are produced, which means that roughly 1/3 of the workforce is no longer required. What are those 1/3 to do?

Almost everyone in America is a descendant of immigrants, for that matter. In many cases, those immigrants were fleeing violence and persecution, their passage paid by overlords who felt it was very decent and moral of them to ship the people overseas rather than just killing them off (i.e. the Irish in America).

Now, in the long run, that will be better than just keeping the status quo. But we should remember that a quick change can be significantly worse in the short term, especially one where the focus is incorrectly applied (in these cases, the focus is on goods being produced by a child labor instead of the conditions that result in children working to begin with; ending the child labor does not end the conditions and will sometimes make things much worse).

It's one thing if the situation was a matter of children being forced to work. If a kid finds work on purpose to help himself or his family eat and you suddenly make it illegal without removing the NEED for him to have to work to help his family then you've made the situation worse while instituting a policy to make yourself feel better.

My view on politics as I've gotten old has gone squarely to the singular point: No complaints. No rules. Solutions or shut up.

But in these "We must keep the slaves so they don't starve" arguments, there's always a nasty whiff of condescension - the implication that they cannot care for themselves, without handouts. Given freedom and sufficient resources, most people will choose to better their circumstances. Humans fed themselves for a long time before they were enslaved. Getting back to feeding themselves may not be easy, but it's certainly not impossible.

In my reply, I said if they were being forced to work (aka - slaves) it was not okay but if they went out and choose to work it was another story.

In your response you cited a "we must keep the slaves so they don't starve" argument...which is not at all what I said. That's the logical disconnect that happens in many political discussions of these types. You're arguing with something I didn't say unless I'm misreading you, because it partially looks like you're agreeing with me as well regarding people choosing to better their circumstances.

To better themselves, they need to be able to make something where they're at, or be able to go somewhere else. If they're sitting on ruined land, unable to leave, that's a problem that can't be solved with mere hard work. But that's a problem that would not have happened without the slavery in the first place.

This is a really good way to make sure that important things aren't talked about (and, it should go without saying, disproportionately hurts already marginalized people even further). Complaints about a situation are step one of finding a collaborative solution. It may take time to get there, and the process might be annoying (heaven forfend). But I would suggest considering the circumstances you find yourself in that allows you to find them annoying, and being charitable about the search for a solution instead of decreeing from on high.

I expect people who are campaigning on the basis of those complaints to be able to explain why the problem is a problem and exactly how they plan to solve it along with the expected ramifications of their solution.

Campaigning on complaints without being able to extrapolate those details is essentially nothing more than pandering.

Can parties opt-out of your definition of a collaborative solution, or does your definition of collaborative include forcing people to participate, whether they wish to do so or not?

Can I choose not to leave, if I respect other people's natural rights?

My issue about leaving is that if I have done nothing wrong, I shouldn't have to flee from others who wish to violate my rights. Instead, they should respect my right to be unmolested.

Interested in your thoughts, if you wish to expand on this topic.

To that end, there is no "right to be unmolested", and I would underline that particularly for--given the context of this thread--conceived-of rights that effectively serve to provide legal supremacy over other people. (Of which we have many.) "Done nothing wrong" can mean very different things to very different people, and while I am not in favor of ex post facto convictions or anything of the like, I am in favor of amending the rules to the game to be more equitable and, I hold, thus better for the aggregate of humanity--and enforcing them to that end.

So, no. The general will sets the rules of the road, and dissenters can comply (and seek to change that general will if they so choose; part of the societal privilege to try to change that general will is the societal responsibility to obey it when it breaks against you), accept the consequences of civil disobedience (the abrogation of the aforementioned responsibility in hopes of demonstrating injustice to encourage a change in that general will), or leave (fold your hand). As it happens, there are cases where I'd do the second and a couple where I'd do the third.

How does this fix the problem of solutions not actually solving things?

In other words focusing on "conditions" misses the whole point: child labor is anticompetitive because it's all about lowering prices by exploiting the weak and the defenseless. Thinking about the "conditions" won't move the needle, not as long as child labor remains competitive. Child labor would happen near you if the law would allow it, because it makes economic sense to hire children instead of adults for half the price and there are always poor people to exploit.

Also, have you ever considered that some of those exploited children were born because child labor is a possibility?

One should not forget that an economy is a very complex beast, any changes have far reaching consequences and that doing the right thing is never easy.

I am reminded of Joseph Campbell:

“Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order."

No, there is not going to be pure and blameless system of production and consumption.

Older forms of oppression have always existed. Look at other species to see that even without a culture or society, the weak are exploited.

The point, though, is that Roman slavery wasn't very different from modern slavery. They had all the key elements we do - the tools to both imprison humans en masse and exploit natural resources, a standardized transportation network to move both troops to where the exploitation happened and and remove goods from where the exploitation happened, literacy and bureaucracy to manage large-scale, ongoing enterprises, etc. And of course, they had their moral rationalizations for brutality, especially brutality that happened somewhere out of sight.

Without metal, without roads, without heavy transport, without structured military units, without literacy, the tools for mass enslavement really don't exist.