Well if it’s not, then we’d be getting free stuff.
Picture:
We tell China and India and Mexico etc.
“Hey guys, how about you guys us food and houses and clothes and cars and oil and computers and we give you absolutely nothing in return.”
They’d probably say
“No thanks, Lincoln freed the slaves.”
No, you’ve got it backwards. Look at US-China.
I mean anything and everything that goes along with a global economy. This can include things like companies expanding their customer base exponentially along with the fact that companies can produce goods in other countries for pennies on the dollar that they would pay a US worker. Along with anything else that is a reality in a global economy.
One American digs 2 buckets of coal a day (for a day’s wages.)
One American makes 2 pairs of pants a day (for a day’s wages.)
They trade and each one of them has pair of pants and 1 buckets of coal every day. (kinda poor)
.
.
.
Along comes a Chinaman who says “I’ll make pants for 1-10th of one day’s wages.”
So, the pants-maker stops making 2 pairs of pants per day and starts digging 2 buckets of coal a day.
After they trade for pants, they each have more than before.
Before they each one pair of pants and one bucket of coal.
After trading with the Chinaman, they each have one pair of pants and 1.8 buckets of coal,(which they can buy sell trade for anything else they want, or even save and go into retirement ~80% earlier.)
They are better off, they are not worse off. If they are worse off it is because of something else (restricting the umber of coal miners??), not because of the trade itself.
The problem with this model is the subsistence nature of the coal mining. When you become uncompetitive because of wage disparity there is seldom a new profession that you can just jump into to replace your side of the value exchange.
IRL here is always another profession.
IRL you might have to move to a new town, (Reading PA was once a US textile giant.)
Go to school and become a plumber, don’t go to school and become a waiter, one unskilled job pays the same as the next as the next as the next.
IRL that’s how it works, we just blame imports (which can be accurate if the change comes too suddenly, all in one town etc., but not in a general case.)
I should add that “globalization” is about a lot more than just import/export. In that, extended definition I do not consider myself a “globalist,” and prefer the term “free trader.”
Is there any legislation that could address these issues, in a fair way that allowed companies to outsource their operations, but still be able to protect American worker’s ability to find employment that provided a decent income?
It has to be more than just a wage disparity. My guess is lower taxes.
Why I think local/small business groups on social media are a good idea. Businesses can support eachother, get connections, and people can support businesses in their town and get discounts only shown in the group. Not to mention job opportunities that might be posted. Owners of businesses can help eachother out.
Thus, I joined one.
They outsourced, as that increases profits, which increases the stock value, which increases their compensation. The plan was to retrain those that lost their jobs due to outsourcing…but that never happen. Government and Business failed them.
Perot was right. So was Sanders.
We could have done it in a way, that lowered poverty in the countries we outsourced to, if it was done in a thoughtful strategic way, where it could have been a win,win,win, win.
But this is America…greed tends to win most of the time.
And now we deal with a very wealthy "communist/authoritarian China.
The billionaire class wins again.
What has happened in the past (at least in the 70s and 80s) was union busting.
The steelworkers union, the autoworkers union, the textile workers union, all got busted via imports. So it that is your frame of reference (it is for most people) they have conflated the two issues.
Successful union-busting efforts will always result in lower wages and a lower standard of living for the union worker who winds up in a nonunion job.
The fact that the imports were involved is not the wage-changing issue. Many people use that incorrect frame-of-reference, (I did for years) and as a result wind-up drawing an incorrect conclusions.
The wage changed because the job no longer existed, and the work that remained wasn’t of the same scope and compensation level. It doesn’t matter if it is a union job, or a non-union job. Workers compete against foreign workers to be the labor force selected to manufacture a specific product. The labor pool located in the nation with the lower cost of living is always going to be at an advantage against the labor pool in the nation with the higher cost of living. The same is true between regions within large geographical nations We have different costs of living, which drives local wage levels, here in the US. This in turn causes industrial migration between regions. The union busting argument is just a shiny object trying to conceal the real force driving industrial migration
I don’t think that is correct. Coal mining is unionized. John Deere is unionized.
(directed to everyone, not just e7)
Let’s start with what we already agree-on.
I am pretty sure we agree on the below, but before I go off in some crazy direction I want to be sure.
++++
I think we know instinctively that 100% isolation, a total ban on all imports would be bad for an economy. (That’s why no one is advocating that.)
We also know that an economy where all goods and services must be imported would be bad. In fact, it would cease to exist.
(See illus.)
We can add at least one point to the illustration (let’s call it x=1) demonstrating that any nation’s economy, including its working class, receives at least some positive benefit, when that economy imports at least some goods and services.
(See below)
The idea makes sense, right?
We’re on the same page with this, right?
But, although the concept works
I think we can also agree trying to define one perfect level of imports, x=2, is a fool’s errand. It is the wrong approach.
More likely, I think people believe things like
"We should produce 80% of our cars and import only 20%.
but
“Textiles are different, we should make 20% of those and import 80%.”
and
“It’s okay to import our rice and our tea from China, but we should support the American farmer. If China switched to growing corn, we should put tariffs on it and keep growing American corn.”
I agree, that would be a correct approach. The illustrations I have drawn above illustrate a useful concept, but it would be silly to try to find “the perfect ‘x’.” This must be done on a case-by-case or product by-product basis.
I think this is what we agree on, right?
If we agree on the above, and I believe we do) then I wonder
Since we probably agree it’s impossible to find ‘x’ (from above) as a number, how should we, the US economy, decide if we are better off importing 80% of our autos but 20% of our sneakers or the other way around?
Tea grow perfectly fine in large parts of the US.
It grows in plant hardiness zones 8, 9 and 10 perfectly well, and even grows in parts of zone 7.
Yet when David McCullough wrote his best-selling celebratory work of US history, 1776 (For which President George W Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom) he includes a multi-page appendix in the back. The appendix is a timeline of the American Revolution and the last entry in that appendix defines the
American Revolution ended and had been won, when an American-flagged ship returned from China (Wuhan, I think) with a shipload of imported Chinese tea. *That of all things marked that actual end revolution
The American patriots, you see, were upset that King George had been allowing only the import of British tea, from the British colony, India. The founders of our nation were not fighting that American should be American grown, they were fighting for the free import of tea from China. They were fighting against import duties. They were fighting for free markets.
Let me clarify. I’m not arguing that Globalization and Technology are bad. What happens though in this debate is that there’s a segment of the Left (@Guilds, etc.) that bemoan the loss of all those good paying union jobs of the 1960’s blaming it all on Capitalism, Reganomics, etc., without any understanding of Globalization, Technology along with the natural evolution of the economy which followed.
Had the unions in steel and autos and textiles etc. been busted up and those jobs moved to Bayou Country, or Arkansas, or even US possessions like Puerto Rico and Guam, much of the “damage” would still have occurred.
It was not international trade, that caused the “damage.”
It was not “globalization” that caused the “damage.”
In fact, waitress moms, and absentee baby-daddies working in Walmart, were better off when cars and steel and textiles and computers became cheaper.
It’s easy to be the world’s industrial leader when your countries industrial complex is the only one that hasn’t spent 30 being bombed.
We rode that wave for a long time. Now the rest of the world is catching up.
Reading Pennsylvania was once a textile capital. In the late 60s, the mills began to close down unable to compete with imports from Asia.
Note this was not
“Company moves production to Taiwan”,
nor was it “John Deere moves factory to Mexico.”
The companies were going to close down the Reading factories anyway. People were going to buy socks and gloves and underwear made in Asia, because Asian-made socks and gloves and underwear were cheaper.
It is a smaller, more forgivable error to think that tariffs or protectionism will protect us.
It is idiotic to put the US corporations in one’s sites and blame them. Those jobs were going one way or another. The greedy evil capitalist corporation whose name was on the side of the factory had nothing to do with it. change the sign on the side of the factory as many times as you like, change the ownership structure (corporation., ma & pa operation, collective, government-owned) as many times as you like. It still all woulda happened.
