One amazing similarities between other ideologies and libertarianism is the thought that each one of them has decided that whatever programs are currently in place, we are absolutely sure that everyone is living at the expense of everyone else, that everybody is at once a parasite and a host. Most people think that it is something intrinsically wrong with human nature when they look around and see the government hurting their citizens, the governments hurting each others’ citizens, the woman and the minority being paid less than racial majorities for a myriad of sociological reasons, businesses being in cut-throat competition with each other, men killing, raping, murdering, etc.

One thing to note about the use of the word “exploitation” as a bad is the literal definitions that we can look up (1) to utilize, esp. for profit; turn to practical account; (2) to use selfishly for one’s own ends; and (3) to advance or further through exploitation; promote. So we can look and say that it isn’t a bad in any sense of the word. Being utilized in order to create or promote; and with definition two, we can say that both the laborer and the factory owner exploit each other, the former doing so by using the capital investment the latter built up in order to make a living.

Just to go over a few of the vicious cycles of exploitation—used in the negative sense in which it is generally used–and the real implications in such a mentality.

(Il)legal Immigration as Exploitation

Because we each belong to our country and it belongs to us, citizenship is of the utmost importance in choices for employment. If an illegal comes into our country—and to some, even a legal immigrant—looking for work, he is taking jobs that belong to us as a country and a body of homogenous people and giving it to an alien who is now considered to have “stolen” this job from good, hard working, local men. This is laying claim on another man’s labor—that is, the capitalist who has gained the money using his physical body in order to employ people is now told that he may not do with his productivity as he pleases.

When immigrants go through the process of legal immigration and assimilate into a culture, the majority of people agree that this is a good thing. Having borders and an immigration process already presupposes the idea that the land here is, again, owned by all of the citizens and the government of the country. On one hand, practically speaking, 300 million people or the “government” cannot own property because nobody has the exclusive right to use and dispose of and responsibility for the maintenance of such property belongs to no one. Let’s just take the argument at face value though: the government via consent of the governed owns all of the land within the borders—this is called land tenure. As a citizen, when you agree that the government owns all of the land (because surely, nobody is saying “aliens can come here as long as they stay only on private persons lands”) you are then inherently accepting that you do not own your property.

Employers are by fact of minimum wage laws taking advantage of immigrants. I believe there is enough information on this site to cover all of the things that are wrong with minimum wage laws, from its creation of unemployment to laying claim on another’s person body because what you think a “living wage” ought to be.

Capitalists exploiting Workers

This is the most easily debunked idea of exploitation ever. We know that the reason that capitalists reap a profit while workers earn wages it because of the formers ability to suspend current consumption for future consumption and also his willingness to take the risk of losing his investment. But let’s call this beside the point for a moment. The more important thing is that both parties, the employer and the employee, are entering into a voluntary contract. That is to say that all involved have decided that the parts they are playing in the transactions are more than just mutually beneficial, but that both think that they are getting the better part of the deal otherwise they would do something else with their time. If the capitalist thought that his money was worth more than what value the worker will bring, he would instead keep his money. If the worker believed that his time would be better spent doing something else, or believed his wages to be truly “unfair,” he would use his hours and energies differently in order to pursue the best he can. In a free society, no man accepts a job or wage he doesn’t want.

Money and Banks as Exploitation

Everybody is very aware that money is the root of all evil and that there are giant, shape-shifting lizard monsters who control the world and have created a One World Government plutocracy. Honestly, in its current form, banks and the money supply are not completely voluntary actions due to the massive amount of government interference—which could, of course, be said of most institutions in their current form.

But can money really be evil, or bankers really exploitive in a free society? Money is a common medium of exchange, and banks work as both a storehouses for this medium of exchange and also an intermediary between lenders and borrowers; that is, lenders are savers who use time deposits as a way to signal to bankers it is okay to lend out the money and then gain interest due to their suspended consumption and borrowers agree of their own volition that they are willing to pay interest on such borrowed money because of their current consumption.

Are the lower class being taken hostage by the higher class by virtue of the fact that they need money now and cannot save and those who have planned, suspended consumption (saved) are now able to provide that needed money to those who are less well off than them? When we phrase the proposition like this, it seems ridiculous that being able to provide what is necessary for one is the equivalent of harming them. Perhaps it is the bankers themselves who are harming the whole of humanity outside of that profession by providing a safe place for people to keep there money and a way for those more fortunate to lend to those less fortunate for a profit to both the bankers and the saver, whilst the borrower is stuck with footing the bill of their gain?

One really important thing to notice about this is that the person who has the time deposit and the person who takes out the loan do not have to know each other. This is one of the more obvious mechanisms that makes the capitalist system more blind to race, class, color, creed, etc. Of course if a bank wanted to serve only blacks or only men, this would take a chunk out of their profits and that profit is exactly what they are in the business for. But what about the man who had saved? Although some people do live off the interest of their accounts, I think it is safe to say that is not the case more often than not. The person certainly does want the interest, but what if this man is a Protestant anti-Semite, a womanizer who finds anybody who harms their persons through the use of drugs and alcohol the scum of the Earth as well, as the rest that aren’t like him? It would exclude a huge amount of people from being able to borrow from him to start up a business, buy a house, or even have a payday loan to get through the week. But if the bank does not have any exclusionary practice, he will not be specifying that the loans made with his money must be to this or that type of person (which sounds like a hard thing to enforce anyway). So what we actually see here instead of a minority being excluded or taken advantage of is the banker allowing a voluntary transaction between two people who would not normally associate otherwise and all parties benefiting from it!

If we say money in and of itself is “the root of all evil” then what we are literally calling evil is indirect trade. If a five-year-old and a ten-year-old trade each other because one has an apple and wants and orange, and the other has an orange and wants an apple, do we call this evil? No. What if we use pebbles as a money because the five-year-old doesn’t like apples so he wants to keep his orange, so the ten-year-old offers him 3 stones for the orange that he can then turn around and use to buy a banana? This is “money,” or what we call evil.

What would a world without trade mean and how far would it extend? Will we call it evil if my mother trades her most recent issue of Cosmo for my sisters most recent issue of Glam? Well, we can say that without a question, this possibility wouldn’t even arise because such publications take a massive amount of division of labor which would not come to fruition in a tradeless world. May my sister who hates doing the dishes trade with my mother who hates doing laundry? Let’s assume family trade is okay. This means each family will have to become self-sufficient. The serious repercussions of such a world and its effects on our standard of living are unfathomable.

But beyond all of this, we look again to the question: how can people entering voluntarily into an agreement be said to be living at the expense of one another and not to the benefit of that they seem to believe it to be, by what standard and whose measurement?
These are just a few of the basic examples of the exploitation that people find the bane of humanity, these agreed upon transactions happening between two or more parties.

But what does exploitation, or to use more apt words: debasement, perversion, misuse and injustice really mean? Where is it that we see these things actually happening?

To go to war on a citizenry who has done no harm accept to live in an area of land monopolized by a state mechanism that is now clashing with another government is exploitation. To agree with an employer that you will work enough to earn the salary he has promised of $82,000, with a marginal tax rate of 25% in the US taken from your check to benefit people you know not and projects you know not, because of some social contract you’ve never seen or signed is exploitation. To tell a person from one territorial monopoly where they may move their body as if you lay claim on it is exploitation.

Only when we live under and with coercive forces may we actually see what it means to take advantage of and to demoralize persons and their spirits. When we step in between two persons and tell them what to do with their bodies, their energies, time and property and act as if we have a righteous claim to usurp some one else’s volition because we don’t trust individuals ability to do what is in their best interest, we are crossing the line between moral and immoral, creative and destructive, humanity versus inhumanity. And only when we realize that we do not have to allow ourselves to be subject to these sorts of transgressions will we live in a world free from “exploitation”.