In a Reuters article about the forthcoming movie The Kite Runner (based on an excellent book of the same title by Khalid Hosseini which I recommend you all read) a bit of limousine liberal callousness is revealed.

Noor Agha is widely acknowledged as the best kite-maker in
Afghanistan, where flying and dueling with kites is the closest thing the war-torn country has to a national sport. He is also a champion kite-flyer.

“The Kite-Runner,” based on the bestselling novel by an Afghan immigrant living in the United States, hits the screens in November, featuring hundreds of kites painstakingly made by Agha in his shack in a graveyard in Kabul’s Ashiqan Arifan area.

He also spent weeks training the movie’s teenage protagonists in kite flying and dueling, skills they used on camera when the movie was shot in China last year.

“I got $30 a day for 45 days, teaching them all I knew.

Sometimes I had to smack them when they didn’t do well,” Agha says, smiling and revealing a missing upper tooth.

Last time I checked, $30/day wasn’t minimum wage.  Or even sweatshop wages in a lot of places.  You’d think these compassionate Hollywood liberals would at least pay this guy the “living wage” they’re always griping about here in the US.

I guess things are a bit different when they’re spending their own money instead of telling other people how to spend theirs.

Personally, though, I don’t really have a problem with the level of this guy’s compensation.  Wages should always be whatever the employee is willing to accept to do the work and not some amount arbitrarily mandated by law.  And $30/day is undoubtedly a significant amount of money in Afghanistan.  Just as the wages those folks in the sweatshops liberals are constantly crying about are actually pretty good wages for those areas.