"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it."
It must be comfortable to think that those who disagree with you does so because they are intimidated by awesomely intelligent liberals such as your heroes (and perhaps yourself?). Has it ever occurred to you that they might feel the same way about you?
I think you may be assuming that either A) the children were forced to work or B) the children (and their parents) just did not know what was good for them. Both seem unlikely to me.
I'm not american. Not a big fan of US foreign policy either. My point is that being upset about assassination of foreign leaders because it is "a crime" looks pretty silly unless you are a full blown pacifist (and thus not OK with any of the killing states at war have done). In that case you look pretty silly anyway.
To me it is interesting to attempt to guess the winners in such a scenario (where robots for a lot of tasks are cheaper than asian unskilled workers). Could it be that countries like Dubai would become manufacturing centers? Some advantages for it as opposed to China/India would be: less corruption, no taxes, flexible and business friendly regulations in general and cheap energy.
I don't like deontological ethics, I especially don't like this sloppy kind. It seems extremely implausible that the moral benefits of a crime could never outweigh its cost. The US has assassinated A LOT of al Qaeda and Taliban members in the "war on terror", is it more permissible if they do it with a drone (even if it does cause more collateral damage) because it just "seems more like war" than the James Bond stuff Mossad has been up to?
"Let's call the product Revipedia. The purpose of Revipedia is to be like Wikipedia, except that it serves as a reliable source on all topics, no matter how technical or controversial, and no matter how detached from reality the centrist mainstream may be."
The US and the rest of the west experienced unprecedented per capita BNP growth since around the time western countries banned child labour. This is the reason for increased living standards. It would not have mattered much in the long run who prevailed because rich (by the standards of 1850 we pretty much all are) parents don't let their children work full time in factories.