"Live Free and Starve" and "The Singer Solution to World Poverty"

Question for blog:  Read "Live Free and Starve" and "The Singer Solution to World Poverty."  Write a blog contrasting the authors' opinions.  Address your possible reader bias, and analyze each argument, ultimately agreeing or disagreeing with each argument or parts of each argument.  Don't forget to use specific quotes to support your opinion and your analysis of each article.

Answer:  In the article "Live Free and Starve," Banerjee Divakaruni writes about a bill that Congress passed that prohibits "the import of goods from factories where forced child labor was used."  Her opinion on this is that if we did not buy the goods from these types of factories, we would not be helping to pay for the survival of the child workers.  Basically, the only options for these children are child labor (with the benefits of clothing, food, pay, etc.) or starvation and poverty.  I can agree with Divakaruni on a few levels; I think that children do need things that will help them survive.  However, I don't think it is right to endorse factories with problems that good impact the health of a child.  The author even says, "These children... spend their days in dark, ill-ventilated rooms doing work that damages their eyes and lungs."  My suggestion, instead of keeping on with buying goods from factories with an unhealthy workspace, we should make sure that the factory workers are in a safe, healthy environment to work in.  Because I normally like to help people, I am biased more towards giving people the best of both (in this case, all) worlds--clothing, food, and pay, as well as a healthy environment to work in.

In the article "The Singer Solution to World Poverty," Peter Singer has one overall theme:  give money to the countries with a great amount of poverty.  In fact, he drives this point home so far that he actually offended me while I was reading this.  In an almost commercial fashion, Singer says flat out (several times), "I trust that many readers will reach for the phone and donate... $200.  Perhaps you should do it before reading further."  Although I agree that donating money to people in countries who can't have as many things as Americans is the right thing to do, I would not want to make people feel guilty about not doing so.  Throughout the reading, all I could think about was how bad I felt about myself not giving money to these people.  I understand it if Singer was simply saying that Americans might want to donate a certain amount of money once or twice, but he suggests that people need to keep on donating.  Eventually, Singer's argument became repetitive, using the same "you-need-to-feel-guilty-about-this" argument over and over.  I definitely have a bias against this article because I dislike commercialism, and this felt like a written commercial to me.  Also, being Americans, we don't appreciate it when someone can make us feel guilty about certain things.  This would be another one of my biases; I don't enjoy being insulted, therefore, I was completely against the author.