Politics & Power Quote by Barry Commoner

Commoner’s move here is to hijack the language of “advantage” and turn it into an indictment. Child labor isn’t framed as a moral horror first; it’s framed as a market edge - the kind that looks rational inside a spreadsheet and grotesque outside it. That’s the point. He’s exposing how capitalism can treat cruelty as a feature, not a bug, as long as the incentives line up.

The key phrase is “removing that advantage for all firms.” Commoner isn’t asking individual companies to discover ethics on their own; he’s arguing that morality has to be engineered into the rules of the game. Left to voluntary virtue, the “good” employer gets punished by higher costs, and the “bad” employer gets rewarded. Regulation becomes not a constraint on freedom but a collective agreement to stop competing through harm. He’s essentially defending national policy as a tool for solving what we’d now call a race-to-the-bottom problem.

Context matters: Commoner was a scientist who became one of America’s most prominent environmental thinkers, and this is his signature maneuver - using clear, almost plainspoken logic to connect private profit to public damage. The child-labor example works because it’s settled history; it forces readers to admit that markets didn’t self-correct their way to decency. Then the subtext lands: if we accept national policy to neutralize destructive “advantages” in labor, we can’t pretend it’s radical to do the same for pollution, climate risk, or public health.