Do you guys read Thomas Sowell regularly?   Cuz y'all should.   Few folks are as highly esteemed in academic circles as they are in mass market publications and Sowell is one of them.   His material is a perfect wake-up call for your anti-economics friends of all stripes - sharp enough polemics to demand attention, short enough to deliver a meaningful lesson in a single sitting, economically sound, and willing to take on tough topics. 

Since Arundhati Roy's been on my mind of late, I dug up a pair of recent Sowell articles on the wretched evils of corporate exploitation of 3rd world laborers -

Those who vent their moral indignation over low pay for Third World workers employed by multinational companies ignore the plain fact that these workers' employers are usually supplying them with better opportunities than they had before, while those who are morally indignant on their behalf are providing them with nothing

Bam.  Splat.  Frontal attack deflected and case turned.   And all in a single, well crafted sentance accessible to the lay, but not stupid man.  That's why I love Sowell.  A constant theme in his work - an attempt to really understand why the other guys think the way they do

At the heart of all this is a confusion between the vagaries of fate and the sins of man. All of us wish that workers in Costa Rica and Cambodia, not to mention other poor countries, were able to earn higher pay and live better lives. But wishing will not make it so and causing them to lose their jobs will not help.

...The left-wing spin is that the poor are poor because the rich are rich. That opens the door for a big power-grab by the left in the name of "fairness" or "social justice" or whatever other rhetoric resonates with the unwary and the ill-informed.

In many respects, he's made diagnosis of Left/Right philosophical splits his life's work through a series of interesting books - Vision of the Annointed and Conflict of Visions.