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The massive elephant sitting in the corner is that it's more expensive to pay for American workers because we have laws and regulations that protect them and en
by dcow 9y ago
The massive elephant sitting in the corner is that it's more expensive to pay for American workers because we have laws and regulations that protect them and ensure they have a decent quality of life. So now it becomes an ethical problem and we all know what to do when we encounter a difficult one of those: shift liability to a corporate entity and chalk up the negative ethical aspects as economics. (I'm not the one exploiting foreign labor, that's mega corp.)
The greatest feature of globalization is that it distances consumers from the source of the goods they consume. This might be "good" for the consumers in the short term, but it's absolutely not good for their s/economy/quality of life/ in the long run.
What's the effect of instant gratification global capitalism? The American economy now has to compete with the foreign economy. If workers in the foreign country experience a lower quality of life in order to sustain American consumers, then the American worker gets shafted because they have to lower their quality of life to compete. If they won't or can't (because we consider those conditions too inhumane for our own workers) then they have to find new work.
Globalism is the great equalizer.
EDIT: I'm not necessarily saying this is bad for the world (except that human rights and quality of life regress to the mean), and one can also argue that the freed up resources might be put to more.. sophisticated.. uses. I don't know...
I'm responding to the parent: the only way globalizing an economy is good for a strong country (one sitting above the mean) is if you define good in a strictly economic sense like "lowest prices for the consumer" (which is the premise of the parent's argument). It's easy for an economist to do that in isolation because that's the name of the game. A government, however, is not tasked with driving down prices for consumers (that's a market's job) but rather is responsible for roughly maintaining quality of life for its citizens and with protecting its workers, among many other things. Allowing the economy to run unchecked at a global scale essentially equates to selling out the workers. It's not just about who's consumers get the lowest price at the end of the day.
- burfog 9y agoYes, as long as you take "protect them and ensure they have a decent quality of life" to not include employment! We're telling grown adults what they can't do, supposedly for their own good. That quote from C. S. Lewis applies: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
- dcow 9y agoSo we should let grown adults bypass our own ethical frameworks for minimum wage and worker protection and allow them to exploit foreign labor markets at the expense of local workers just because they're grown adults? Excuse me if I don't find that very compelling. Look I generally agree with your C.S. Lewis quote, seriously. But if it's tyrannical to maintain a baseline for workers, then we should abolish minimum wage and all worker protection laws and just let the adults go at it (I'm sure they'll eventually tap in cheap children too). Point being we've already agreed that workers need protection so you're arguing against the status quo (and calling it a tyranny nonetheless).
- jstanley 9y agoWorkers are not exploited. If they have a better option they'll take it. If they don't have a better option, then you're not exploiting them, you're offering the best option available to them. > we should abolish minimum wage Certainly. > we've already agreed that workers need protection Actually, not all of us have agreed that. > you're arguing against the status quo (and calling it a tyranny nonetheless) Just because something is the way things are doesn't make it not a tyranny.
- jgh 9y ago> Workers are not exploited. If they have a better option they'll take it You're arguing against things that workers put in place themselves a century or more ago. 8 Hour workdays. Weekends. No child labour. Minimum wage. Workers have already fought these battles, are you suggesting we should go back to square one and do it over again for the hell of it?
- forapurpose 9y ago> the only way globalizing an economy is good for a strong country is if you define good in a strictly economic sense like "lowest prices for the consumer" This is not based on any serious understanding of economics. Just reading around this HN discussion should explain why free trade does far more. But really, if you truly care about the economic welfare of people rather than the politics of nationalism, just find some basic economics online about free trade; it's not very complex.
- dcow 9y agoDo you care to elaborate? The Wikipedia page on Free Trade literally lays out the Free Trade vs Protectionist dichotomy and explains that governments often adopt policies to protect local economies, workers, agendas, etc. in a Free Trade market... It sounds like you're arguing that Free Trade is just better hands down because some other smart people said so. My point (which you have not addressed) was that there are ethical and social components beyond the pure economics of the situation that weigh in (the exact weight being very much the topic of the OP) despite the fact that contemporary economists argue in favor of Free Trade.
- forapurpose 9y ago> The Wikipedia page on Free Trade literally lays out the Free Trade vs Protectionist dichotomy ... It just lays out what some Wikipedia users wrote; there's no reason to think it represents the economic facts or the whole picture, especially on a controversial topic. Look up some real economics instead of Wikipedia. Look at Britannica at least, which probably is written by an actual economist.
- dcow 9y agoWhy don't you edit the page then if it's so misguided?
- simonh 9y agoa worker in the US that doesn't get a job in manufacturing still lives in the US and has all the other opportunities and advantages from that. They still got a US education, benefit from US medical and social programmes, live in a country with US infrastructure. It's reasonable for that person to expect a certain level of quality of employment. A worker in Rural china with no manufacturing job is an an utterly shitty position. All those league tables of education are about the cities. My wife is Chinese, I've been to the Chinese countryside. The conditions are utterly appalling. The jobs these people can get in the factories can transform the lives of their whole families. Of course workers should have minimum safety protections, etc, but you just can't compare the situations of these two people - unless you can guarantee that Chinese worker the same opportunities and advantages as the US worker outside that employment. Only then are the situations comparable.
- sjg007 9y agoWell one idea is that the first world economies transition to a higher value add for a set of industries.