Jesus H Christ, I leave this place for one minute and now we are taking about selling kidneys.
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itâs the forumosa equivalent of âyouâre just like Hitler!â
on weekends, theyâre 財ä¸éä¸
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Fair point. I was sort of giving them the benefit of the doubt 
Iâve noticed that the better companies donât even see a need to hire cheap foreigners (at least not as a cost-cutting and corner-cutting exercise).
Anyway, I think your point stands - if you teach the foreign worker the rules, and what support they can get in the case of infractions, the bosses have less incentive to play silly buggers.
Unfortunately itâs very much a case of one hand not knowing what the other hand is doing. From what Iâve heard, the labour dept. actually do their best, when cases do come to their attention. The underlying problem is that thereâs another branch of government which actively colludes with the seedy practices that bring people into the country and keep them in the dark (figuratively and literally).
The labor departments and MOL are executive. Youâre not telling us the CY or ExamY is behind all this, are you? 
(I think you meant another unit, or another organ, of government â no pun intended.)
itâs the forumosa equivalent of âyouâre just like Hitler!â
No, that went out of style in the 00âs. The new one is âyouâre just like a liberal arts college gender studies professor!â
Any government that finds itself in a position where it has to regulate kidney sales screwed up a long, long time ago.
That would be every government on the planet! 
Except maybe the special ones like SealandâŚ
âŚand Iran. I wouldnât have guessed Finleyndia is modeled after such a country â but goes one step better by letting foreigners join the market too! 
Absolutely not. I meant different people. You can call those groups whatever you like, but theyâre just people. My point was that somebody somewhere sees fit to keep the whole âlabour agenciesâ scam going, with all its degrading rules and restrictions, while somebody else is tasked with cleaning up the inevitable fallout. Lack of joined-up government, as they say.
âJust like a Canadian psychology professorâ, surely? 
Nope. Ask a random sample of your Taiwanese friends if theyâd sell a kidney for half a million. Then ask them why they wouldnât.
The Law merely writes down what most people actually believe. If that werenât the case, youâd need a telescreen in every home telling people what to believe, like in Nineteen Eighty Four. Oh, wait âŚ
Doesnât that exactly illustrate my point? âLegalâ is not the same thing as âunrestrictedâ, as described in the article. They only have to make rules about it precisely because the place is so fucked that people consider it as a viable option in the first place.
If Iâm not misreading that, Finley is telling us there are no poor, desperate people in the first world, and also no rich people who want to buy organs from the poor, desperate people in other countries or make money off of them. Iâm all out of rainbows, but Iâll give that an idealized rhino. 
The Law merely writes down what most people actually believe.
Oh no, what have I done? 
Weâll be at this all weekend!
The tl/dr is no, thatâs not how law works. Iâll leave it at that for now.
Aiyo. I honestly canât imagine how on earth you managed to extract that from what I wrote. Everyone else seemed to follow along OK.
I said that if things have got so bad that people are selling their kidneys, making more laws cannot stop it; and furthermore the law has probably created that situation in the first place. This can apply to subcultures just as much as nation-states, but I would still argue that such subcultures donât survive well in healthy societies for the same reason cockroaches donât thrive in clean kitchens. There are probably dirt-poor people in Luxembourg, but if you were in the market for buying a kidney, that wouldnât be where youâd start shopping.
Simplistically: as long as people have some way of earning a living other than selling their kidneys, they will choose those alternatives, ie., people only sell their kidneys when the government deliberately makes them poor enough to close off more sensible choices.
This is not the ârational actorâ theory, by the way. Itâs more to do with a hierarchy of moral taboos: poor people are more easily induced to put aside the taboo about selling themselves if they are brought up in a society where ânormalâ modes of earning a living are considered futile or wrong (with or without just cause for the belief).
Abject poverty is pretty damn hard to achieve, because in most of the world, nature is quite generous. It takes a concerted effort to ensure widespread, consistent, intractible poverty. You have to impose certain dyfunctional thought patterns and demolish very specific freedoms over multiple generations to induce people to sell body parts (or themselves). Sadly, many governments are very good at doing precisely that, deploying a particular set of skills honed over many years of fucking people over.
Spend some time in places that have lots of laws but have not understood the hearts-and-minds mechanism that underpins the smooth functioning of The Law. Youâve got roughly 100 countries to choose from. Youâll soon change your mind.
I do enjoy these conversations, by the way. I find it fascinating that two people can broadly agree on desirable endpoints while disagreeing so vehemently on the best route.
Nearly 100,000 Vietnamese brides already in Taiwan, 10 years ago.
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There are dirt-poor people in the poster boy of first-worldness, the USA. Ditto the former poster boys of civilizedness and modernity, the UK and France. They have very notable subcultures, so it follows from your argument that the countries themselves are not healthy societies. No argument from me on that oneâŚ
Simplistically: as long as people have some way of earning a living other than selling their kidneys, they will choose those alternatives, ie., people only sell their kidneys when the government deliberately makes them poor enough to close off more sensible choices.
Itâs all the governmentâs fault! The private sector knows best, which we can easily see by looking at all the prosperity and lack of poverty in previous centuries when things were less regulated (by governments).
The organ trade wasnât much of a thing before technology made it feasible, but people did sell their hair and, of course, their conjugal capability, which I sort of think this thread was about before we appropriated it (sorry everyone else 
).
Letâs rewind:
and furthermore the law has probably created that situation in the first place.
I assume you mean âthe lawâ in general, not specifically the organ trade law, i.e. youâre not saying banning the organ trade is what created the organ trade. (Even Finsky couldnât be that daft, could he?)
I said that if things have got so bad that people are selling their kidneys, making more laws cannot stop it;
But from the logic of âlaws wonât stop people from committing crimesâ it follows that the ban on murder has no deterrent effect, nor does the ban on theft, speeding, bad parking, or anything else thatâs illegal. Are you sure youâre not a member of the Anarchist Party?
âSpend some timeâ, sheesh. Weâve gone over this before!
And I also enjoy banging my head into the wall, as long as I donât injure myself too muchâŚ
isnât it true? If things are so bad that people are selling their kidneys, I guess crime rate of the place is high too.
âPeople will commit theft and murder anyway because the government gives them no other choices, ergo we should legalize theft and murder.â Is that it?
(This is not to equate selling your own kidney with theft or murder. Iâm just not sold on the âlaws are bad mâkay?â argument.)
Some of the places with highest rates of these case are Nepal and Bangladesh. Crime per se is more organized and they suffer from rotten corrupt governments. they are not poor countries, they have very greedy elites. As Finley says, takes a lot of effort to keep people hungry, uneducated and poor.
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Oh, the âonlyâ person being exploited when a Taike buys a wife from a poor country for $200K is the guy?
I donât think so.
The guyâs wallet is clearly getting exploited.
It makes Tinder a âPimpâ!
Heâs certainly getting the shittiest end of the stick, yes, but he signs up for it, so Iâm not feeling too sorry for him. Whatâs your interpretation?
Read tango42âs article. It gives you a pretty good sense of the subtleties involved here. Bad things are happening, but the word is not âexploitationâ as such. Iâm not even sure what the right word is. However, injecting lots of cash into communities that havenât figured out why theyâre poor (or why other people are ârichâ) is generally a very bad idea.
Correct. At least we agree on something.
Of course thereâs no such thing as a perfect society - theyâre all a work-in-progress. Nevertheless I think you can arrange them on a roughly ordinal scale.
Governments, as I remarked about the Law, are a reflection of the society that creates them. When a society doesnât understand important social tools like âwin-win co-operationâ, or âmy word is my bondâ, their governments generally donât either. And the whole sorry mess just carries on chasing its tail. Itâs not so much that the private sector knows best, but if a society is capable of implementing a private sector, itâs because it understands the moral precepts that underpin commerce. Those memes filter through into government, and you get a feedback loop that reinforces good things instead of bad things.
Yes. Its shape and its intent. Is it a monster constructed with the express intent of harming people, or is it a judiciously-calibrated and reliable restraint on bad behaviour?
I didnât say that. I said that a statute forbidding something will not necessarily have the effect of stopping it from happening. A whole bunch of other cogwheels have to be in place for that to happen. First, people have to believe itâs a good law; laws that nobody agrees with get worked around, one way or another. Second, the law has to be enforced fairly; if itâs not enforced at all, it will be ignored, and if itâs only enforced with a view to benefiting certain people, it will provoke sullen rebellion. Third, it has to be objectively useful. Any law that turns out to have negative consequences will be very quickly rejected.
These criteria must apply not just to individual statutes but to the Law as a whole; if, as I said, the Law is so fucked that people seriously consider selling their kidneys, then people will assume that the statute forbidding kidney sales is just another manifestation of government idiocy. A bad body of laws creates conditions that subvert the entire concept of Rule of Law.
In other words, if you want to rule by diktat rather than social consent, youâd better have a lot of useful thugs at your disposal who are just barely smart enough to follow orders and know which is the dangerous end of the gun.
There is no âergoâ. Iâm merely pointing out that, if you forbid theft and murder, itâll make little difference unless youâve met the basic requirements for a legitimate system of Law and Order. Itâs an observation on reality, not a prescription.
Example: my favourite hellhole has a murder rate roughly 40 times the rate of Western Europe. Thatâs about the same as medieval England. Same with theft. On paper, they have perfectly good laws about murder and theft. There are multiple levels of failure that prevent those laws having any effect:
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The Law as a whole is a ludicrous shambles of contradictory nonsense that even lawyers canât understand. So the very concept of Rule of Law gets no respect: itâs dismissed as a pointless waste of time. Which it is. If you think of it in terms of technology, the Law in Germany is a brand-new iPhone X, whereas the Law in the Twilight Zone is a Fisher-Price toy plastic telephone with one of its googly eyes missing.
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There is no social consensus that murder and theft are universally bad; indeed they believe there are certain situations where itâs legitimate to kill other people and/or take their stuff.
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There is no enforcement of laws (except those that involve extracting money). On paper there are nearly as many policemen per capita as in proper countries, but youâll never see one, and if by some misfortune you do, youâd best pretend you forgot your wallet.
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If you have a serious dispute with someone, or you are wronged, the Law will offer you no redress. Killing someone is therefore a fairly logical way of solving an intractable problem.
I think this is the main problem with our discussions: you keep thinking in terms of your âhellholeâ, having the right number of goons to enforce your will, having enough money to get what you wantâŚ
As I said, organ trade happens in first world countries. Reducing economic inequality would probably be more effective as a deterrent than increasing penalties, but the penalties also have a deterrent effect, and saying âthe law is the problemâ is missing the point.
As for laws that contribute to inequality, thatâs another topic.
Itâs just a representative hellhole. Iâm trying to keep things concrete instead of hand-waving. If you want me to stick with abstractions I can do that too.
Do you disagree with my assessment of the way The Law works, or are you going to just dismiss it on the basis that I always use the same example? Itâs not my fault those guys wrote the book (âHow to Build Your Own Failed State In Your Own Backyardâ). Ah yes, page 194, âHow to Fuck Up The Legal Systemâ.
I was trying to point out that they might or they might not, depending on context; the deterrent effectiveness can vary wildly depending on other social factors. They used to have all sorts of horrible punishments for theft a few hundred years ago, but people still stole things a lot.
I thought it basically was the topic of the thread.
You know I disagree with you about how law in general works.
I donât disagree that laws are less relevant the less orderly a society is. But I donât live in failed or near-failed states, and you canât persuade me to try it. (Iâve tried the 2nd and 3rd worlds, and Iâm fine, thanks.) So the topic of the reduced relevancy of functional state ideas in not-so-functional states is just not of much interest to me.
Fwiw I donât classify Taiwan, Vietnam or Iran as âfailed or near-failedâ. As for your favorite hellohole, Iâll let you do the storytelling.