I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

It cant happen and wont happen, but this downward spiral of competing to the floor can only be stopped if the entire world sets minimum standards of employment. Even them places like the US and EU will need to revise down, while the likes of India and China will have to revise up!!!

Best bit, is we all cause this, no, we demand it when we are purchasing. Free shipping, lowest price for highest quality, etc.

Are "we" willing to pay more to get less, so that people don't get exploited? Nope...

You forget that Cuba has had to work with a heinous embargo imposed upon them for decades. And that it does much much better, society wise, than the devastation, poverty, drug cartel rule, and foreign intervention that goes on in other Latin American countries, of not "socialist" persuasion.

when a society decides to indulge in welfare and collectivism, it almost never goes back and ends up going bankrupt and ruining everyone.

I'm not sure about that "clear trend". The US has a huge national debt, people living in the streets, 30 million people eating in public kitchens or with coupons, and 2 million people in jail? I've also been to Mississippi, Alabama and South Dakota among other states. There are places that are worse than third world areas. If it wasn't for the dollar imposed as a worldwide exchange metric from better times, the ability of the state to print inflated money, and the country's diplomatic might, anyone would call the country a failure.

I do not know how familiar you are with the current situation in Europe, but over the past 30 years you could see the trend of massive public debt (fueled by government intervention in all aspects of private life) growing and growing over time. And now you get Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, close to bankrupcy. Hardly a coincidence.

Hardly NOT a coincidence. Countries on the top echelons of the European and world economy have had (and still have) far more extended welfare than Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain. Think Sweden, Denmark, Holland, etc. This has nothing to do with welfare, and a lot to do with corrupted government spending (a la Latin America), bribes to give overpaid state contracts to specific companies, bureaucracy etc. Plus, Germany controlling the Euro fiscal policy in a way benefiting the top-tier economies, to the detriment of smaller countries.

In fact, if you confuse welfare state with the near bankruptcy of those countries, how is the opposite working for, say, California?

LOL. They were "miserable in the countryside" because their old way of living and farming was not a priority anymore for the central government, that needed city workers to build the country's industry. So, in essence they gave them incentives to come to the city, and they also made it so they the old village system wouldn't work, stopped subsiding, redirected resources, etc. It's a centrally planned economy, it's not a "coincidence".

The sweatshops

--and no quotes needed, those are real sweatshops, and 99% of the HN readership wouldn't stand an hour there (we're people that are even annoyed by browser popup windows and such first world problems), and yet some consider them as fit for the Chinese people--,

don't provide them "a better life than what they had", they just make it so that they are kept alive, by eating, and sending some money to their families back home. The "better life" they are "provided" is working 14-hours at best in hellish conditions, then sleeping till the next day, and drinking themselves to oblivion on weekends. Yeah, slightly better than dying of starvation, if those are your only two options.

Incidentally, that was the way the old English industrial revolution thing started. They forced farmers to work in the factories, in similar hellish conditions.

"While the average life expectancy all around Europe increased, that of the average factory worker decreased. There were "almost no safety devices on machines, accidents were common.' (Wallbank, 490) Edwin Chadwick's 'Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Population of Great Britain' penned in 1842 provides a terrifying look inside the workplaces of the period. 'That the annual loss of life from filth and bad ventilation are greater than the loss from death or wounds in any wars in which the country has been engaged in modern times. That of the 43,000 cases of widowhood, and 112,000 cases of destitute orphanage relieved from the poor's rates in England and Wales alone, it appears that the greatest proportion of deaths of the heads of families occurred from the above specified and other removable causes; that their ages were under 45 years; that is to say, 13 years below the natural probabilities of life as shown by the experience of the whole population of Sweden.' (Chadwick, available online at: http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/history/chadwick2.html)

How can you have a capitalist economy without consumers to signal prices? I think I just don't understand your point here. Consumers obviously create value to my mind, because the knowledge of what they're willing to consume is itself valuable. How do you understand differently?