4 ms·

Sure people do make the connection. But no amount of lower costs across the board will help a newly unemployed person. For that person, the costs and benefits j

by sooheon 10y ago

Sure people do make the connection. But no amount of lower costs across the board will help a newly unemployed person. For that person, the costs and benefits just don't match up. Structural unemployment is an inevitable result of globalization, we need ways to mitigate this. Trade from the POV of rich countries is often a redistribution from the poor (uncompetitive labor) to the wealthy (multinational corporations), justified by the "gains from trade". We must be willing to aggressively redistribute these resulting gains back to the disenfranchised or see populist backlash.

ansible 10y ago
I'm generally for free trade, but there has to be a more equitable arrangement than what we've got now. If the USA is enforcing environmental regulations for their factories, this will obviously cost more than just dumping used chemicals outside in a pit. So the cost of goods in another country will be less if it doesn't have good (or any) environmental regulations. This is separate from labor prices. So it is not fair to the USA, and it isn't fair to the people living in countries without good environmental regulations.
- stefs 10y ago
  ignoring environmental protection costs for monetary success is mostly short-term planning and will - i'm a software developer, so i'll take this as a comparison - have the same consequences as short term planning and accumulating technical debt in software development. see it as an indirect investment in infrastructure that ultimately benefits everyone (but also you). you can't run a factory without government funded roads and railways, aka funded by your tax payer money. it's the same for environmental expenses: skimp now, and you might not have a market to sell to in a decade. so, if you outsource to another country it wont help in the long term because climate is global. that much is clear. the rest is sufficiently explained by dawkins stable dove-hawk systems. you might want to try to gamble the system for personal gain, but if everyone does it, it'll collapse and everyone dies. so you shouldn't and protest transgression by others, otherwise the system might collapse. i'm convinced you can play fair and still make a profit.
cookiecaper 10y ago
The way to ensure that these profits are "redistributed" back to the people of the host country is to eliminate free trade. If the items you sell in America must be produced by an American workforce, then the money is pumping back into the economy as Republicans always claim. If the money is being taken from Americans at the point-of-sale and then shipped out to China, Americans lose. Trump is proposing that we put a cost-prohibitive tariff on foreign-built goods so that Americans will only buy them if there is truly no decent American competitor. Sanders and Trump are approximating the same root cause here -- corporate greed is depriving the American worker. They're just extracting the value that belongs to the American worker at a different point of the transaction. It's debatable which is superior, but Trump's approach is more compliant with conventional American laissez-faire capitalism.
- sooheon 10y ago
  Eliminating free trade is precisely the wrong direction to go, in my opinion. > "If the money is being taken from Americans at the point-of-sale and then shipped out to China, Americans lose." You can't only look at one side of the equation. American grown soybeans and American manufactured aircraft are being bought in China, and billions of dollars worth of their hard earned yen are being "shipped out" to America. The point of free trade is for everyone to specialize in what they have a comparative advantage in, because this will expand the production frontier overall. Putting cost prohibitive tariffs on goods the Chinese are better at producing (let's just say commodity electronics) may prop up US commodity electronics makers. But we would be subsidizing inefficiency. And if the Chinese put similar tariffs on American exports like commercial aircraft in return, everybody loses. Yes, you can just eliminate free trade, but the point of free trade is to grow the pie. You just have to cut it fairly after it's grown.

by sooheon 10y ago

ansible 10y ago

I'm generally for free trade, but there has to be a more equitable arrangement than what we've got now. If the USA is enforcing environmental regulations for their factories, this will obviously cost more than just dumping used chemicals outside in a pit. So the cost of goods in another country will be less if it doesn't have good (or any) environmental regulations. This is separate from labor prices. So it is not fair to the USA, and it isn't fair to the people living in countries without good environmental regulations.

stefs 10y ago
ignoring environmental protection costs for monetary success is mostly short-term planning and will - i'm a software developer, so i'll take this as a comparison - have the same consequences as short term planning and accumulating technical debt in software development. see it as an indirect investment in infrastructure that ultimately benefits everyone (but also you). you can't run a factory without government funded roads and railways, aka funded by your tax payer money. it's the same for environmental expenses: skimp now, and you might not have a market to sell to in a decade. so, if you outsource to another country it wont help in the long term because climate is global. that much is clear. the rest is sufficiently explained by dawkins stable dove-hawk systems. you might want to try to gamble the system for personal gain, but if everyone does it, it'll collapse and everyone dies. so you shouldn't and protest transgression by others, otherwise the system might collapse. i'm convinced you can play fair and still make a profit.

cookiecaper 10y ago

The way to ensure that these profits are "redistributed" back to the people of the host country is to eliminate free trade. If the items you sell in America must be produced by an American workforce, then the money is pumping back into the economy as Republicans always claim. If the money is being taken from Americans at the point-of-sale and then shipped out to China, Americans lose. Trump is proposing that we put a cost-prohibitive tariff on foreign-built goods so that Americans will only buy them if there is truly no decent American competitor. Sanders and Trump are approximating the same root cause here -- corporate greed is depriving the American worker. They're just extracting the value that belongs to the American worker at a different point of the transaction. It's debatable which is superior, but Trump's approach is more compliant with conventional American laissez-faire capitalism.

sooheon 10y ago
Eliminating free trade is precisely the wrong direction to go, in my opinion. > "If the money is being taken from Americans at the point-of-sale and then shipped out to China, Americans lose." You can't only look at one side of the equation. American grown soybeans and American manufactured aircraft are being bought in China, and billions of dollars worth of their hard earned yen are being "shipped out" to America. The point of free trade is for everyone to specialize in what they have a comparative advantage in, because this will expand the production frontier overall. Putting cost prohibitive tariffs on goods the Chinese are better at producing (let's just say commodity electronics) may prop up US commodity electronics makers. But we would be subsidizing inefficiency. And if the Chinese put similar tariffs on American exports like commercial aircraft in return, everybody loses. Yes, you can just eliminate free trade, but the point of free trade is to grow the pie. You just have to cut it fairly after it's grown.