The last of a series of the three Lectures on Liberty was held last Thursday night at the Granada Theatre. The lecture, “In Defense of Sweatshops,” was given by Benjamin Powell, professor of economics at Suffolk University in Boston.

“Many people attack sweatshops because it’s low wages and poor working conditions,” Powell said. “What determines compensation? It is determined by how much the workers contribute to revenue.”

Powell criticized the “Anti-Sweatshop Movements,” explaining that boycotting sweatshops only results in lower wages and throwing more workers away from jobs.

“You can’t compare them to U.S. standard but should compare to the average national income,” said Powell, “Wages in sweatshops are eight times as large as national income in the third world countries.”

Powell praised the sweatshops by comparing them to other, worse alternatives.

“Children in the third world countries, because their families are so poor, they cannot go to school,” Powell said. “If they are not in the factory, they are in the field.”

Powell talked about some things that are featured in his article “In Defense of Sweatshops,” released earlier on the Library of Economics and Liberty website.

“After one sweatshop in Bangladesh laid off 50,000 children in 1993, what are these children’s alternatives?,” Powell said. “According to the British charity Oxfam, a large number of them became prostitutes.”

To prove sweatshops really bring benefit to poor countries, Powell listed the process of sweatshop development including technology, capital and human capital that are brought by developed countries to poor countries which all contribute to increase wages.

Lillian Sun, junior music education major, attended the lecture with an open mind.

“He had a strong argument, but I still cannot stop thinking about the ethical issues,” Sun said. “He mentioned the contribution to minimum wages, but why can’t we just raise it a little bit.”

Even after the lecture, Sun still sees problems with sweatshops.

“I am still confused about another thing, that is, sweatshops products that sell in the United States threaten local factories’ survival because of their much lower price,” Sun said. “How can he explicitly explain that sweatshops on one hand help third world’s workers find jobs while on the other hand throw local workers out of jobs?”

Brian Miller, assistant professor of history, thought this lecture the most impacting of those this year because of Powell’s approach to the topic.

“I found the lecture on sweatshops the most compelling particularly because of the presentation style of Dr. Powell,” Miller said. “He really was kind of a nuts and bolts basic here’s my argument here’s the evidence right in front of you, there you go, make of it what you will, and I thought that was a really effective way of presenting to an audience.

He said listening to diverse views, like Powell’s on sweatshops, is an important part of education.

“I think it’s important to bring a diversity of thoughts and speakers the a university community even if you don’t necessarily agree with the opinions being offered in the lecture,” Miller said. “That’s your opportunity as a student or a member of the community to come and meet the speaker, engage with them, debate with them. That’s what they want.”

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SIUC Professor Jonathan Bean speaks about civil rights Tuesday night at the Granada Theater. Professor Bean addressed issues from early government racism to affirmative action. Kenny Thompson/The Bulletin

The second of this semester’s three Lectures on Liberty occurred last Tuesday at the Granada Theater. Professor of history at Southern Illinois University Jonathon Bean gave his presentation titled, “God Almighty Made but One Race, Separating Race and State,” based on his latest book, “Race and Liberty in America: the Essential Reader.”

“It’s the first book to tell the story of classical liberalism, to bring it together, and yet people like Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington and the NAACP, they all breathe classical liberalism,” Bean said.

In his presentation, Bean showed a slideshow, gave a history of civil rights leaders and explained the ideas of classical liberalism. Bean said classical liberals believe in individual freedom, individual liberty and limited government.

“Classical liberalism is liberalism as it should be,” he said.

Bean explained in his presentation that he wrote two other books over the history of government that resulted in him having to testify before the Supreme Court because he exposed that “affirmative action creates racial discrimination.” He said what he discovered in writing those books inspired him to write “Race and Liberty.”

“Programs designed to help disadvantaged minorities ended up hurting them in the worst way and I began to see that there were connections between what our government does today for the common good and what it did and said 100 years ago, 200 years ago,” Bean said.

Bean said that many of the civil rights leaders he talked about in the lecture and in his book are often forgotten about because they “don’t fit.”

“They’re not ‘big government’ liberals and they’re not ‘big government’ conservatives and so how do we put these people in a box?” Bean said.

Associate professor of history Gregory Schneider is teaching the course, Liberty and the American Tradition, at Emporia State which is in conjunction with the lecture series. He said it’s important for students to be exposed to classical liberal thought and to have a chance to see if some of those ideas appeal to them.

“This is not meant to, in the course especially, proselytize or to push my agenda on them, but it’s meant to expose these ideas to them to see if they make sense for them and make sense in their own lives when it comes to issues of liberty,” Schneider said.

Schneider also said the lecture, being on civil rights, was timely with Black History month. He said people tend to think of civil rights as being tied in with government, but Bean explained that the government gets in the way more than  it helps.

“It’s government that actually interferes with that rather than helps, so it’s a different kind of approach towards understanding the development of equality of civil rights under the guise of the ideas of liberty and the American founding,” Schneider said.
Abbie Morrison, junior elementary education major, said she enjoyed that Bean brought up figures that are sometimes overlooked in the fight against racism. She also said she agreed with his ideas.

“I agree with it because it’s something we’re discussing a lot more in our teaching classes is that, you know, things are changing so much that we’re not going to have a race, and so it kind of was an issue that I see needs to be dropped,” Morrison said.

Bean said he’s answered questions from all over the country, but he loves talking to students because that’s what he does for a living. He said he wrote the book with the hope that teachers might use it in their classrooms because everything else out there is “same old, same old.”  He said with teaching you have to love what you study and convey that love to students.

“You have to have a compulsion to be a good teacher, to try to be a good teacher and to take a subject, history, that so many students found boring in high school and make it interesting and that’s my job. And it’s fun… and it beats working in a factory,” Bean said.
Lectures on Liberty are free and open to the public. The next lecture will be April 8 at 7 p.m. at the Granada Theatre. The speaker will be Benjamin Powell, professor of economics at Suffolk University.

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Matthew Spalding speaks on what early Americans went through to obtain their liberty from England Tuesday night for the Lectures on Liberty series at the Granada Theater. Spalding is the director of the Heritage Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. Jonathan Elliott/The Bulletin

The Granada Theater, 807 Commercial St., played host to the first of three “Lectures on Liberty” Tuesday. Matthew Spalding, of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, delivered the lecture “Liberty and the Constitution.” Spalding began his talk with a moving account of the American Revolution.

Based on writings from America’s founding fathers and interviews from the time period, Spalding argues that the “great theme of the American Revolution was self-governance.” What provoked the colonists to rise up against the British was not the Stamp Act or the Crown’s taxes on tea. Rather, it was the question of who would govern the colonies. Spalding argues that it is that question – the question of self-governance – that persists in America still today.

            In Spalding’s view, progressives and conservatives come from two separate ideological camps, representing two distinct philosophical traditions. Conservatives are following in the tradition of the British Revolution and adhere to a strict constructivist interpretation of the Constitution.

Progressives, on the other hand believe in a more fluid interpretation of the Constitution – a living Constitution.  Progressives are following the logical conclusion of the French Revolution. It began with idealism, relativism and radicalism. It ended with despotism.

“The Progressive argument has never been settled by the American people,” Spalding said.

The issues facing the current presidential administration are not really new issues at all he said. The real issue, is about what role government should play in society.

“It is no coincidence that most of our problems are attempts to solve earlier policy decisions,” Spalding said.

Health care reform was part of a platform introduced in 1912, after the German model of health insurance from 1904. Spalding argues that the real crux of the matter is not health care, but the role of government in spheres of life that are not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution.

For Spalding, a federal mandate requiring everyone to purchase health insurance is anathema because it would mean that the federal government would regulate the people’s right to do nothing. And if the government can do that, Spalding said, government becomes limitless.

The alternative to self-governance according to Spalding, is a state where government plays a greater role in people’s lives and steps in to do things for citizens that previously were considered the realm of the individual. In his view, this would look something like modern day Europe.

Spalding is an unabashed proponent of “American exceptionalism” – the concept that America is a unique experiment, special and set apart because it was the first nation to be founded based on the idea of self-governance.

He also maintained that the founding fathers were united by their religiosity and mutually inspired by the Bible. 

Historian and Emporia State University Professor Karen Smith disagreed with that claim, arguing instead that several of the founding fathers were deists and while they may have been raised with Christian faith traditions, they did not adhere to them personally. Benjamin Franklin fits this bill, said Smith.

Not everyone in the audience shared Spalding’s sentiment that big government was the source of America’s ills.  In a phone interview, Smith went on to say that she did “not agree that government is too big,” and that “this country is too big and too complex to be left to the forces of the market.”

Wichita State University Constitutional Law Professor Sarah McIntosh agreed with many of Spalding’s points and thought the lecture was delivered well, but “the only thing is that there were no solutions, there was no game plan for how to get back to the founding principles. I asked him if he thought a return to America’s founding principles should occur at the local, state, or federal level, and he sort of copped out, saying ‘all of the above.’”

Spalding made the case that the real issue facing America is the issue self-governance and what role government should play in society.  He said that while there is a difference between freedom and liberty, government is ultimately the issuer of liberty.

“Every generation in America has to decide to vindicate the cause of liberty,” Spalding said. “All we have to do is act worthy.”

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Vincent Cannato, associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, describes the conditions on Ellis Island during the height of immigration to America during the late 19th and early 20th century. Cannato also discussed similarities between immigration laws that were in effect then and the ones in place today. Kellen Jenkins/The Bulletin

ESU’s Lectures on Liberty series brought Vincent Cannato, associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, in Boston, Mass., to The Granada Theatre on Wednesday night with stories and statistics of immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century.

“I can see why immigration is an issue here in America,” said Nayaf Alluhaiden, junior computer information systems major. “But what’s made America great is having a small portion from everything. You have people from Europe, Africa, China and everywhere coming here. I can do my own cultural thing here very easily.”

The Lectures on Liberty series focuses on liberty’s role in American society as viewed by Republican and Libertarian speakers. The series was started by Greg Schneider, associate professor of history, with a grant from the Fred C. and Mary Koch Foundation.

“I am hoping this can be an annual event,” Schneider said. “In both of our lectures the historians involved presented a good topic with lots of contemporary relevance, addressing what it means to have liberty in a democratic society and what impingements government can bring to that.”

The lecture began with Cannato’s views on immigration’s relationship to democracy and liberty.

“Our adherence to democratic ideals often clashes with our Universalist creed of all men and women are created equal,” Cannato said.

Cannato provided statistics on immigrants coming into the United States via Ellis Island during the peak of American immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century. Examples of immigration legislation and political cartoons demonstrated the often hostile attitude that he feels America has had toward immigrants.

“I liked his use of political cartoons,” said Chelsea Rogers, freshmen secondary education major. “The lecture helped to broaden the ideas about immigration more than the classroom does, and it gives you a full spectrum.”

Cannato also discussed what he believes is the plight of many immigrants all over the world.

“The Declaration of Human Rights says that anyone can leave their nation for any reason they choose,” Cannato said. “However, it says nothing about making other nations take those immigrants in. There is nothing in that declaration that says immigrants have to be accepted anywhere.”

Correlations between the earlier wave of immigration and today’s new wave of immigrants were also emphasized in Cannato’s lecture. California’s Proposition 187, which sought to prevent illegal immigrants from using social services and public education, was an example of modern immigration legislation.

“Voters in California said ‘We will not pay social services to illegal immigrants,’” Cannato said. “It was later ruled as unconstitutional by a federal court.”

A question and answer session followed the lecture, where the subject of employment of legal and illegal immigrants at the Tyson meat packing plant in Emporia was entered into the discussion.

“Businesses like cheap labor,” Cannato said. “Meat packing houses and chicken plants, like Tyson, are natural places for immigrants to seek work.”

The question of the direction of modern immigration legislation’s future was also discussed.

“I am a historian and so many of our problems have no easy solution,” Cannato said. “I do predict that within the year the Obama administration will pass some kind of immigration reform and, like in the past, we will think it will solve our immigration problems all at once when it probably will not. This issue will continue to be something our nation deals with.”

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