Why I stopped being a voluntourist

I can't stress this enough, if you want to earn money you find something you are good at and society thinks is worth something. If you want to help someone you find something you are good at and people need. Maximize your impact by specializing in what you are good at and outsourcing that in which you are not.

Policy band-aids aren't inherently bad. But if it's still the same band-aid a hundred years later... that's not the "push start" icebraining is talking about. (And we're not a hundred years later yet, so I'm not saying there's definitely a problem or anything.)

It's... you learn enough to think you've learned something, when all you've really learned is a superficial, well-packaged veneer. If the point is to have something to do while being on vacation, that's fine... but why pretend? It doesn't really help that things are often designed to be entertainment. Is it really a good thing to put your culture on as a show? Sure, there's satire, but satire isn't satire when the audience doesn't actually know what you're satirizing.

(Also, isn't the income differential a fundamental part of a tourism economy? I mean, in Seattle's Pioneer Square, we've got random little gold mining shops and see-the-underground tours, which I'm also uneasy with... but that's not a tourism economy. I'd estimate a good 50% of people who work in this neighborhood are in tech; others are nightclub stuff; and a noted above-average complement of food people; etc. There's a tourism industry here, yes, but it's not a tourism economy.)

Like I said, it's more feeling than reasoning.

Westerners are descended from all races and creeds, they just happen to be part of a certain geo-political and financial region now.

There is a minute proportion of the population of the "Western World" that has any control over the business process beyond that they're able to leverage by voting with their dollars, through their unions or when voting.

>but there is a tiny sliver of them - those that enact and enforce the "legal protection" //

On the contrary, the established culture - moulded most recently through democratic process - has created an environment that limits the extremes that remain profitable. Most major companies in my Western country will [seemingly have] flout[ed] the law if the fines are sufficiently low; they're limited largely by what is going to be considered reprehensible enough to prevent people buying their goods/services. Directors receive multi-million dollar remuneration packages whilst they employ children and women at extremely low wages and often in situations in which they're effectively captive - we're talking companies like Adidas¹, Unilever, Nestle, those with the most recognised brands.

Many of the members of the controlling sections of Western government demonstrate at times a, shall we say, fluid approach to morality too. They often seem almost equally willing to lie and cheat and exploit the good of others to their own ends without due regard for the effect on the populous or environment.

tl;dr Power is oft to corrupt.

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1 -- example, http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcompanyratings/adidase..., Adidas's employment practices are illegal in Bangladesh imagine how out of sync with the moral mores of USA they are.