By Paul Weiser
Leftists often campaign against "exploitation," meant to be understood as one person or group taking advantage of his or its relative position with respect to another. Though the left generally uses "exploiter" and "exploited" as mere terms of abuse and valorization respectively, they contain an important analytic truth even the most libertarian economist must acknowledge.
The leftist analysis is static: A possesses an advantage over B - for example, A is a large corporation and B is its employee. A can impose choices as to wages and conditions that B can escape only by a difficult change of employer; B may be trapped by geographic immobility or limited skills. A, in leftist terms, exploits B.
Public choice economics recognizes exploitation as a goal, not a state. Some - doctors, lawyers, unionists and patent-holders, for example - engage in rent- seeking behavior whereby they strive to force those who would be healed, win judgements, gain employment or use their ideas to pay them. Rent-seeking tries to create an exploitable relative position. If these positions required no effort at all from the rent-seekers (not the case in these examples, except for unionists) these professions would truly be exploitive.
Now consider another group which takes advantage of a geographic rigidity: illegal immigrants. We might wish Mexico an island subcontinent 500 miles away (we only fly to Cancun and Cozumel anyway), but it isn't. We're trapped here, living next to a political and economic cesspit that overflows our unfortunately long land border with the politically warped, economically deranged and unconscionably fecund; they pollute what would otherwise be a more prosperous and far more law- abiding nation.
Are you getting that, leftists? We don't exploit Mexico. Mexicans exploit their geographic advantage - a true, unchangeable situation - to victimize us. Now get on that picket line and throw the scabs out!
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