Ah Freedom. It's almost as amusing reading affluent westerners expound on the 'freedoms' enjoyed by modern peasants as of urbanites sharing their wisdom on farming practices.
I think I've quoted this gem from Isaac Asimov before:
“I use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom, go to the bathroom any time you want, and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And this to my way is ideal. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on. And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears.”
Freedom has to be the world's most precious commodity, much more valuable than gold, and even less affordable. Currently, peasant farmers in India have the freedom to choose;
between starvation and virtual slavery.
When they choose slavery, they are free to watch their children sicken and die as a result of their own uneducated misuse of chemicals, some of which are banned in their country of origin. They are free to indenture themselves for 2 to 5 years to pay for 1 year's crop seed -depending on the weather, and whether or not their pest resistant seeds actually resist pests.
And of course, they are free to commit suicide.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av6dx9yNiCA

Well stated Grim

As Janis Joplin opined, "Freedom is another word for nothing left to lose".

In the West we stand to lose our jobs and, consequently our homes if we don't toe the line.

In the East, the peasants can lose their lives and those of their children. The rising middle class woman is discovering, as Pericles' article demonstrated, the sacrifice for financial independence. And the men of the east are discovering the 'freedom' to choose the sex of their offspring - a real slice of the nose to spite the face THAT choice.

PS

Poirot, you are on the money. Pericles, you are presenting as a middle class twit.

It's ironic, Pericles, that you condemn your simultaneously "smug" and "guilt-ridden" Greenies, above, yet latterly you're adopting, or at least feigning, the moral high-ground yourself. You defend the monstrous effects of the capitalist juggernaut with this nonsense that zillions are raised out of poverty by it, and the greater nonsense yet that it's about "choice"—the freedom to starve in the streets if you don’t get on board—and you harangue dissenters with the accusation that they would deny the prosperity they enjoy to the world's poor. Speaking for myself, I’d do no such thing; I’d have the living standards in wealthy countries reduced to modest and sustainable levels, imposing wealth caps, thus severely compromising the profit motive. But of course I don’t buy the nonsense that prosperity relies on an unlimited profit motive. Nor do I believe that consumerism equals quality of life. What you call “progress” is nothing more than expansion, and not qualitative at all, based on squeezing every drop out of our material assets and demeaning humanity’s potential. Here’s a fascinating essay I read yesterday: http://tinyurl.com/3go6qj5 which accords with the premise of this thread.
But the real arguments I have to defend are admittedly difficult—that capitalism doesn’t lift millions out of poverty; and, Economically and ecologically, prosperity in the global system is counterbalanced by poverty—and based on reasoning that goes beyond a fixation on the present. To use my mouse plague analogy again, the millions lifted out of poverty are comparable to the mouse population just before the grain runs out. When the economy and ecology fail, prosperity turns into destitution on a biblical scale—but we live in the moment, don’t we? And this isn’t hypothetical; we are seeing economies, social and natural systems degenerate, as Cribb attests.

tbc

cont...

In a closed and finite system that is fully exploited for profit, the available (finite) energy (wealth) is both unevenly distributed and subject to entropy. If it were possible to go on expanding forever, your “progress” might be sustainable, and defensible, but we’re already passing dangerous limits and there’s no hope of China’s and India’s populations ever achieving Western-style living standards, drastically unequal as they are. If there are only so many consumables available and a tiny but expanding minority, among overall expansion, is taking the lion’s share—derived by cultivating unsustainable demand—increasing poverty in the short-term, soon followed by general collapse, is inevitable.
And you defend this rapacious and inequitable and knowingly self/destructive process—whose dynamics cannot be gainsaid—with the moral hypocrisy that our “communal task” “is to help those less fortunate, to better themselves”, as if modern capitalism had anything to do with humanism—originally an ethical and purposive narrative. What you’re defending is a process of wilfully ruinous extravagance. I’d go so far as to call it “evil”—but we’ve done away with such antiquated and negative nomenclature, haven’t we—rationalised it away in favour of a more positive spin!

@ Grim & Co

Here’s SPQRs improved bathroom metaphor:
If you start off with two couples sharing a big house, each with a bathroom to itself , each sharing the kitchen, entertainment facilities and both utilizing the huge back garden to grow most of their food crops .Relations would likely be pretty amicable . Life full of choices & dignity.
( though If one couple was partial to taking extended 1 hour showers while the other limited itself to 5 minute ablations there might be issue when the water bill comes in --but we’ll leave that angle aside )

However, this idyllic arrangement would likely be shattered when the families decide to have kids. Particularly if one family limits itself to two children while the other decides to have fifteen. For pretty soon the larger family would be experiencing long queues for their bathroom. And pretty soon the larger family would be agitating for a larger share of the garden.

And things would likely get decidedly less amicable if the grim landlord . Intervened and arbitrated that –based on per capita – the only fair thing would be to limit the lesser family to one small corner of the house and allocate time sharing arrangements for the bathrooms.

PS: At the root of the problem is too many people:
http://www.medindia.net/patients/calculators/pop_clock.asp

SPQR,

No one is denying the population problem - but that doesn't excuse the more affluent from using all the hot water while exploiting others to pay for it.

"Lifting millions out of poverty" is code for indenturing third world peasants for profit. As Squeers points out, we've rationalised the rhetoric in favour of a more positive spin.

Numerous links have been posted to demonstrate that Western corporations (with the aid of the World Bank and the IMF) infiltrate third world economies and alter the playing field with structural adjustments, skewing peasant economy and practice with a view to massive and ongoing profit.

Pericles' assertion that uneducated peasants have a choice to reject GM seeds is disingenuous. These artless people believed what they were told about the "magic seeds" from the West....and what misery was sown.

Western corporations have no interest in the despair of these people or their degraded environment. "Profit" is their God - and altruism is merely their spin.