"Actual factory owners" also said getting rid of child labor would bankrupt them; they said the same thing about sick leave and a whole number of other now standard measures.
I'm sorry, but you don't ask the fox if the chicken coop should be protected.
Of course their capitalist interest would suffer if they had to make investments, but I don't really care if the monopoly man can have one fewer yacht.
> "Actual factory owners" also said getting rid of child labor would bankrupt them; they said the same thing about sick leave and a whole number of other now standard measures.
That's very country dependent. In Germany, some "actual factory owners" founded kindergartens and maternal leave, before it was enforced by activists. They first understood that not everything is about money and they need to look their employees in the eyes when they sit next to them in the church on Sunday and also understood, that a happy, worry-less employee is an employee that can focus on the work and work harder. Lenin said about the Germans, that they are to lazy to do a revolution, but I think the actual issue is, that German countries mostly got rulers actually interested in the well-being of the population.
In Germany a lot of regulation used to be introduced by grassroots movements and was followed voluntarily and later the state adopted the winner of the regulation competition. See TÜV, FSGV (basically a random association deciding how to build roads that the state just adopts) etc. A large part of German economic and social failure is, that we don't have that culture of self-regulation and enforcement anymore.
The Stell argument is actually valid and not fear mongering.
The steel industry simply can't survive with current CO2 emission prices (there is a financial instrument for it).
History does not begin in 2001. There were a lot of invasions which devastated the region, and they went both ways. The Hindu Kush mountains are often described as "Hindu killer" in India, because of how many Indian slaves lost their lives when being forcibly transported over them.
Maybe the whole region would have been better off if it stayed Buddhist.
"Well, ask people in Kabul how they feel about Ostrava compared to where they live."
If "being visibly more developed than Kabul" is the same as "Capitol of global capitalism", then global capitalism did a good job lifting people out of poverty. Because at least a few billion people live in a way that, from Kabul, will look attractive. Even most of India is now developed well beyond Kabul standards.
I'm sorry, but you don't ask the fox if the chicken coop should be protected.
Of course their capitalist interest would suffer if they had to make investments, but I don't really care if the monopoly man can have one fewer yacht.