The fancy words need to be unpacked so the two perspectives espoused can be brought together, please allow me. First off, that's not quite what they said. They

The fancy words need to be unpacked so the two perspectives espoused can be brought together, please allow me. First off, that's not quite what they said. They said, "that labor will never be available to US residents. Quite a different thing than "employers". The math changes when you, US citizen, have to sign the checks, with your own money, earned from a 'real' employer. Now the dollar policy in theory matters. With a stronger dollar, it's harder for US citizens to buy and sell goods domestically and it's cheaper to buy them abroad. Cheap Asian electronics, more expensive American goods. Applies to labor as well. Employers found it cheaper at some point to outsource labor whenever they could abroad. That's the theory. Reality is that the dollar hasn't been strong for some time now. Employers still outsource labor where the trade-off is worth it. But the trade-off isn't always worth it anymore. Jobs are coming back to America. But not the jobs that would pay a living wage to someone who would sell that labor gathering cans off the street. That would require the dollar to fall another order of magnitude, totally upending global commerce and jettisoning the idea of the dollar being the global reserve currency even deader than it already is as we fritter away our goodwill and the de facto hegemony it provided. The dollar floats on the public markets and there's been no political will to do anything more than pay lip service to strong dollar policy. America has never been kind to its underclass, temporarily embarrassed millionaires they must be like the rest of us. The problem is our over-reliance on markets. Markets do one thing and one thing well, serve individual self-interest. They cannot serve public interests except when the public interests align with individual self-interest. To a market, an incentive is an incentive, questions about how humane they are are questions that cannot be answered by a market. To a market, your labor is a good that you sell, and the market, being human interest, has as much interest in getting your offered labor for as cheaply as you're willing to offer it as you are interested in getting all the things you want for as cheaply as possible. This is all supposed to work, and by that I mean it requires the whole country to participate in the creation of a grand fiction. Religious society declined in the 70s and with it went the American predilection for grand fiction. Now we're left with the ugly truth behind the fiction and we don't even have comforting lies to sell to the underclass anymore. I don't know what the way out for us is, but I do know how some European countries found a way through it. There's the Nordic model. A ton of wealth was generated through resource extraction and is now held at the state level, creating the same effect that university endowments do for their ecosystem. This does not typically happen with resource extraction economies, particularly large ones, look to Russia for where that goes wrong. The Nords got lucky due to a shared culture and very few external geopolitical threats. We could discuss France and Germany, but this is getting long so I have to cut it short. Europe in general can leverage shared culture that goes back thousands of years, while the US built its in all of some 300 years, counting from around when the settlements first started taking off. This makes a lot of things much much easier, as culture is generally how humans solve coordination problems. In many ways we're more of an empire than a nation-state. Multi-ethnic empires have to be governed according to different principles than nation-states. "American" as an ethnic identity still needs to gel. The Internet is bringing about a "universal culture" that might get us further to an answer but in the meantime Americans are having to re-learn how to be charitable. I get the desire for living wages. I really do. But they're expecting the market to solve the problem for us. That fiction is deader than Jimmy Hoffa. America has spoken, and we do not want anything getting in the way of the almighty market. So it's humans that must solve the humanity problem that inhuman markets cause. Charity for your fellow man, expect more tipping culture and more browbeating to donate. Sorry.