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You seem to want to kill flies with nuclear weapons. The vast majority of third world workers benefit from free trade and freely choose the jobs it produces.

You seem to want to kill flies with nuclear weapons. The vast majority of third world workers benefit from free trade and freely choose the jobs it produces. Protectionism sentences people far poorer than you to far worse economic lives. Taking away Apple assembly jobs doesn’t increase third world wages or worker protections, it makes them worse. Those workers are consigned to work back in brutal rural jobs that not only pay less but are far more dangerous. Globalism is how the third world living standards catch up.

arminiusreturns 6y ago
My countries government should understand the implications of the policies it impliments, including the impact on people in other countries, but my governments first concern shouldn't be those other peoples, it should be it's own citizens! For those who seriously try to understand this topic, the implication you aren't talking about (and a myriad more) is that due to this we can expect the first world standards/wealth to decrease in response. Of course there are those who then respond "good! about time!" or some equivalent, but I digress. The mental gymanstics I see being performed in comments here boggles the mind, but I am thankful at least to have a refresher on all the kinds of responses I need to be prepared to rebute. Lets restate them as prereq for responding to them: (on globalism) It increases the wealth of poor people in other countries It offers more employment opportunities for said people It increases the wealth of the third world in general It's not globalism, it's the companies who participate in it and aren't heald accountable. You had a "protectionist" president and how did that work out? It's not globalisms fault, it's capitalisms fault. Globalism as a term is a "racist dog whistle" and an "antisemitic conspiratorial buzzword" So far, none of these are particularly well thought out or presented, and suffer obvious weaknesses. I'm not sure if I feel like taking the time currently to dissect them each right now, but they will go in the todo list.
- wolverine876 6y ago
  > My countries government should understand the implications of the policies it impliments, including the impact on people in other countries, but my governments first concern shouldn't be those other peoples, it should be it's own citizens! The people in other countries are human beings with exactly the same value and rights as I have. The responsible thing to do is to do both. Just like my responsibility is to both take care of my family and my community and the world, all at once. If I sacrifice one, I'm irresponsible and failing. I would be (and sometimes am) ashamed that my government fails at those responsibilities. The parent assumes a zero-sum tradeoff, but that's not how trade, peace, and freedom work - they benefit everyone. Thankfully, I have great solutions internationally. Globalization and the democratic world order have been the most successful international policies by orders of magnitude. Name any point in history, any approach to international trade or international relations, that has yielded the success of the post-WWII era? Not only in economics, but in peace and freedom. We need to do better. What better option do you offer, that will improve the lives of the next generation
  - arminiusreturns 6y ago
    > The people in other countries are human beings with exactly the same value and rights as I have. This is untrue. I am very much a believer in individual rights as set forth in the decleration of independence, so on a philosophical level to an extent I agree, but the to say people in other countries have the same rights as a citizen of the empire is just silly. > The parent assumes a zero-sum tradeoff, but that's not how trade, peace, and freedom work - they benefit everyone. This is at best a naive approach to what peace is in the reality of current machaviellian globalism. As Tacitus said: "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace." > The responsible thing to do is to do both. Like when on an airplane in an emergency, you should put the ogygen on yourself first. To just ignore my point and say, "well, but it is better" doesn't address the issue. There are all kinds of complications with proping up third worlds, but I'll get to that in a second. > (other commenter) Free trade increases the standard of living of all participants, including both the third and first world, so I’m having trouble understanding your point. The point is that not only is this not true, but there are a vast array of costs being ignored. (when I say this isn't true, I have listened to plenty of pro-globalist/pro-free-traders talk about how America and other first world countries are just going to have to get used to the idea that their wealth is going to decrease as it equalizes out globally, of course what they don't say is that the elite a supranational and won't be affected for the most part) So many people here seem to be pretending it's either complete free-trade, or complete isolationism, which not only isn't true, just proves my point that it is abused as a cudgel whenever the topic comes up, but doesn't stand up to any decent level of scrutiny, and is just a strawman fallacy. A great example of this is how the former British empire and later the American empire decided that that would rather have dictators they could influence and control rather than nationalists take power in the third world. Have you seen, in reality, what free trade has done in the case of Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic just for a small list of examples? Massive amounts of death and destruction, later papered over by dictators friendly to IMF and globalist corporations. This is what I mean when I quote Tacitus about them making a desert and calling it peace. More on the IMF, being a great example, promising to lift a people out of poverty, when in reality what they do is embroil a country into debt and servitude while corrupting the political and elite class into aquiscence. So the companies get what they want, the IMF gets what they want, and the elite of a country get rich... and the poor people continue to suffer... but at least they got a few more jobs at the resulting factories so they could buy a few more cokes with their marginally higher chattel-like slave wages... and can now pretend to have exited third world status, despite the continued blowback from those "interventions" leaking onto the global stage. I've only touched on a handful in South America, but if we wanted to we could talk about Africa, or SE Asia, etc. who have all suffered similar fates. I want to say can't believe this is the state of discourse on the topic, but I can. One of the things that woke me up about it is just this kind of response... how any even modicum of criticism of globalism and free-trade is met with a myriad of half-retorts and white-washing, while completely ignoring or mischaracterizing the valid at least for consideration arguments against it. I don't even have to get into details like the ~700k manufacturing jobs lost since the implimentation of NAFTA, or the trade good deficit chart since then to criticize these arguments, and citing some narrowly defined "law" such as comparative advantage that fails to take into account other factors doesn't change that. One just has to look at Mexico post-NAFTA to see how theory doesn't match reality. Yall need to go read Smedley Butlers "War is a Racket", because make no mistake, globalistic free-trade as it exists today was built on a backbone of war, corruption, death and destruction. So think on that as you defend it. Another Tacitus quote while I'm at it: "No doubt, there was peace after all this, but it was a peace stained with blood."
- valuearb 6y ago
  Free trade increases the standard of living of all participants, including both the third and first world, so I’m having trouble understanding your point. Go read up about comparative advantage to understand the true benefits of free trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage Or ask yourself, if you were a lawyer billing $200 an hour for your services, and had a secretary costing you $20/hour doing your typing, would you fire them if you could type twice as fast as them? Would spending part of your work hours on less valuable work make you wealthier or poorer?
  - riversflow 6y ago
    How does exporting dirty industry and dangerous jobs to a place where they are less regulated serve humanity? Let me change your analogy because it is completely unrepresentative of the externalities involved in manufacturing. Say you own a business that happens to produce a bunch of toxic waste that requires dangerous handling, and special payment to dispose of. You don’t want your employees to do it because it’s requires a specially trained employee and having them around increases you workers comp insurance significantly, and they also want hazard pay as a result of their training. Buuut you can go down the street and hire Jo from the corner to take it off your hands for $50. He doesn’t care how dangerous it is, he just needs money for heroin. You can just report that you didn’t produce the waste he’s taking and nobody will be the wiser. Should you hire Jo to take care of it, or handle it yourself? You understand the danger, know how to handle the material, and have the means to dispose of it in an equitable way to everyone. Would hiring Jo be right, simply because he’d be $50 poorer if I didn’t hire him?
    - valuearb 6y ago
      What if my business didn’t produce toxic waste? What if Jo isn’t a heroin addict but instead a poor third world person who lives a subsistence level life? Should I be prevented from offering Jo a better, higher paying assembly job because a small group of sleazy manufacturers use his country to escape environmental regulations? Apple isn’t outsourcing assembly to escape environmental regulations. It’s offering better paying jobs that are lifting chinese and Indian workers out of poverty, while also reducing the cost of their products. That makes them more affordable to a wider audience. Apple, workers and consumers win, because free trade benefits all parties. Environmental controls can only be implemented at the national and international level. If China doesn’t implement them, it’s not the fault of US companies. If you make leading edge batteries that produce lots of toxic waste as a byproduct, the US will require you institute expensive controls/cleaning processes to prevent it from leaking into the environment. But if China doesn’t have similar controls, making those batteries will be cheaper in China. If the US maker doesn’t go to China to make their batteries, they will lose marketshare to companies that do, or more likely Chinese companies. If the US bans Chinese made batteries over environmental reasons, it makes US made electric cars uncompetitive and we lose sales and jobs to Chinese and European car makers. So it’s never free trade at fault, it’s lack of international cooperation on environmental policies. If Chinese made products had to meet a base set of environmental manufacturing standards to be sold in Europe AND North America, they’d comply or lose 90% of their sales. But the problem is that your arguments are often used disingenuously by labor unions whose actual agenda is protectionist policies to raise manufacturing costs in the third world to protect their members from competition. They really want to impose US level minimum wages in third world nations, which would be a disaster given they don’t have the capital and skills to support them. A backwards policy that hurts us too by protecting low value jobs we should be advancing out of.
pietrovismara 6y ago
> The vast majority of third world workers benefit from free trade and freely choose the jobs it produces. Source? Especially for the second statement. They don't benefit from free trade, free trade is the reason why they are exploited and their countries kept in poverty. And how can you say that they freely choose their jobs if the only alternative they have to ridicolous wages and low safety jobs is to starve?
- sumedh 6y ago
  > Source? Especially for the second statement. Too lazy to Google but India used protectionism because it wanted to do its own thing after independence and keep the evil western corporation away. By the end of 1980's India was almost bankrupt and had to get loans from IMF one of the condition was to open up the economy. India's poverty rate started to fall down after the economy opened up.
- valuearb 6y ago
  Third world workers don’t have to work for first world manufacturers like Apple, they can keep doing the jobs they already have. The reason they don’t is their existing jobs are far worse, typically far more difficult and dangerous farm jobs.That’s why when Foxconn used to post new iPhone assembly jobs, Chinese would line up by thousands because an Apple assembly job is a ticket out of poverty. So if first world manufacturers left, your reducing third world workers choices back to the lower paying, much worse work they had before.

arminiusreturns 6y ago

My countries government should understand the implications of the policies it impliments, including the impact on people in other countries, but my governments first concern shouldn't be those other peoples, it should be it's own citizens! For those who seriously try to understand this topic, the implication you aren't talking about (and a myriad more) is that due to this we can expect the first world standards/wealth to decrease in response. Of course there are those who then respond "good! about time!" or some equivalent, but I digress. The mental gymanstics I see being performed in comments here boggles the mind, but I am thankful at least to have a refresher on all the kinds of responses I need to be prepared to rebute. Lets restate them as prereq for responding to them: (on globalism) It increases the wealth of poor people in other countries It offers more employment opportunities for said people It increases the wealth of the third world in general It's not globalism, it's the companies who participate in it and aren't heald accountable. You had a "protectionist" president and how did that work out? It's not globalisms fault, it's capitalisms fault. Globalism as a term is a "racist dog whistle" and an "antisemitic conspiratorial buzzword" So far, none of these are particularly well thought out or presented, and suffer obvious weaknesses. I'm not sure if I feel like taking the time currently to dissect them each right now, but they will go in the todo list.

wolverine876 6y ago
> My countries government should understand the implications of the policies it impliments, including the impact on people in other countries, but my governments first concern shouldn't be those other peoples, it should be it's own citizens! The people in other countries are human beings with exactly the same value and rights as I have. The responsible thing to do is to do both. Just like my responsibility is to both take care of my family and my community and the world, all at once. If I sacrifice one, I'm irresponsible and failing. I would be (and sometimes am) ashamed that my government fails at those responsibilities. The parent assumes a zero-sum tradeoff, but that's not how trade, peace, and freedom work - they benefit everyone. Thankfully, I have great solutions internationally. Globalization and the democratic world order have been the most successful international policies by orders of magnitude. Name any point in history, any approach to international trade or international relations, that has yielded the success of the post-WWII era? Not only in economics, but in peace and freedom. We need to do better. What better option do you offer, that will improve the lives of the next generation
- arminiusreturns 6y ago
  > The people in other countries are human beings with exactly the same value and rights as I have. This is untrue. I am very much a believer in individual rights as set forth in the decleration of independence, so on a philosophical level to an extent I agree, but the to say people in other countries have the same rights as a citizen of the empire is just silly. > The parent assumes a zero-sum tradeoff, but that's not how trade, peace, and freedom work - they benefit everyone. This is at best a naive approach to what peace is in the reality of current machaviellian globalism. As Tacitus said: "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace." > The responsible thing to do is to do both. Like when on an airplane in an emergency, you should put the ogygen on yourself first. To just ignore my point and say, "well, but it is better" doesn't address the issue. There are all kinds of complications with proping up third worlds, but I'll get to that in a second. > (other commenter) Free trade increases the standard of living of all participants, including both the third and first world, so I’m having trouble understanding your point. The point is that not only is this not true, but there are a vast array of costs being ignored. (when I say this isn't true, I have listened to plenty of pro-globalist/pro-free-traders talk about how America and other first world countries are just going to have to get used to the idea that their wealth is going to decrease as it equalizes out globally, of course what they don't say is that the elite a supranational and won't be affected for the most part) So many people here seem to be pretending it's either complete free-trade, or complete isolationism, which not only isn't true, just proves my point that it is abused as a cudgel whenever the topic comes up, but doesn't stand up to any decent level of scrutiny, and is just a strawman fallacy. A great example of this is how the former British empire and later the American empire decided that that would rather have dictators they could influence and control rather than nationalists take power in the third world. Have you seen, in reality, what free trade has done in the case of Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic just for a small list of examples? Massive amounts of death and destruction, later papered over by dictators friendly to IMF and globalist corporations. This is what I mean when I quote Tacitus about them making a desert and calling it peace. More on the IMF, being a great example, promising to lift a people out of poverty, when in reality what they do is embroil a country into debt and servitude while corrupting the political and elite class into aquiscence. So the companies get what they want, the IMF gets what they want, and the elite of a country get rich... and the poor people continue to suffer... but at least they got a few more jobs at the resulting factories so they could buy a few more cokes with their marginally higher chattel-like slave wages... and can now pretend to have exited third world status, despite the continued blowback from those "interventions" leaking onto the global stage. I've only touched on a handful in South America, but if we wanted to we could talk about Africa, or SE Asia, etc. who have all suffered similar fates. I want to say can't believe this is the state of discourse on the topic, but I can. One of the things that woke me up about it is just this kind of response... how any even modicum of criticism of globalism and free-trade is met with a myriad of half-retorts and white-washing, while completely ignoring or mischaracterizing the valid at least for consideration arguments against it. I don't even have to get into details like the ~700k manufacturing jobs lost since the implimentation of NAFTA, or the trade good deficit chart since then to criticize these arguments, and citing some narrowly defined "law" such as comparative advantage that fails to take into account other factors doesn't change that. One just has to look at Mexico post-NAFTA to see how theory doesn't match reality. Yall need to go read Smedley Butlers "War is a Racket", because make no mistake, globalistic free-trade as it exists today was built on a backbone of war, corruption, death and destruction. So think on that as you defend it. Another Tacitus quote while I'm at it: "No doubt, there was peace after all this, but it was a peace stained with blood."
valuearb 6y ago
Free trade increases the standard of living of all participants, including both the third and first world, so I’m having trouble understanding your point. Go read up about comparative advantage to understand the true benefits of free trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage Or ask yourself, if you were a lawyer billing $200 an hour for your services, and had a secretary costing you $20/hour doing your typing, would you fire them if you could type twice as fast as them? Would spending part of your work hours on less valuable work make you wealthier or poorer?
- riversflow 6y ago
  How does exporting dirty industry and dangerous jobs to a place where they are less regulated serve humanity? Let me change your analogy because it is completely unrepresentative of the externalities involved in manufacturing. Say you own a business that happens to produce a bunch of toxic waste that requires dangerous handling, and special payment to dispose of. You don’t want your employees to do it because it’s requires a specially trained employee and having them around increases you workers comp insurance significantly, and they also want hazard pay as a result of their training. Buuut you can go down the street and hire Jo from the corner to take it off your hands for $50. He doesn’t care how dangerous it is, he just needs money for heroin. You can just report that you didn’t produce the waste he’s taking and nobody will be the wiser. Should you hire Jo to take care of it, or handle it yourself? You understand the danger, know how to handle the material, and have the means to dispose of it in an equitable way to everyone. Would hiring Jo be right, simply because he’d be $50 poorer if I didn’t hire him?
  - valuearb 6y ago
    What if my business didn’t produce toxic waste? What if Jo isn’t a heroin addict but instead a poor third world person who lives a subsistence level life? Should I be prevented from offering Jo a better, higher paying assembly job because a small group of sleazy manufacturers use his country to escape environmental regulations? Apple isn’t outsourcing assembly to escape environmental regulations. It’s offering better paying jobs that are lifting chinese and Indian workers out of poverty, while also reducing the cost of their products. That makes them more affordable to a wider audience. Apple, workers and consumers win, because free trade benefits all parties. Environmental controls can only be implemented at the national and international level. If China doesn’t implement them, it’s not the fault of US companies. If you make leading edge batteries that produce lots of toxic waste as a byproduct, the US will require you institute expensive controls/cleaning processes to prevent it from leaking into the environment. But if China doesn’t have similar controls, making those batteries will be cheaper in China. If the US maker doesn’t go to China to make their batteries, they will lose marketshare to companies that do, or more likely Chinese companies. If the US bans Chinese made batteries over environmental reasons, it makes US made electric cars uncompetitive and we lose sales and jobs to Chinese and European car makers. So it’s never free trade at fault, it’s lack of international cooperation on environmental policies. If Chinese made products had to meet a base set of environmental manufacturing standards to be sold in Europe AND North America, they’d comply or lose 90% of their sales. But the problem is that your arguments are often used disingenuously by labor unions whose actual agenda is protectionist policies to raise manufacturing costs in the third world to protect their members from competition. They really want to impose US level minimum wages in third world nations, which would be a disaster given they don’t have the capital and skills to support them. A backwards policy that hurts us too by protecting low value jobs we should be advancing out of.

pietrovismara 6y ago

> The vast majority of third world workers benefit from free trade and freely choose the jobs it produces. Source? Especially for the second statement. They don't benefit from free trade, free trade is the reason why they are exploited and their countries kept in poverty. And how can you say that they freely choose their jobs if the only alternative they have to ridicolous wages and low safety jobs is to starve?

sumedh 6y ago
> Source? Especially for the second statement. Too lazy to Google but India used protectionism because it wanted to do its own thing after independence and keep the evil western corporation away. By the end of 1980's India was almost bankrupt and had to get loans from IMF one of the condition was to open up the economy. India's poverty rate started to fall down after the economy opened up.
valuearb 6y ago
Third world workers don’t have to work for first world manufacturers like Apple, they can keep doing the jobs they already have. The reason they don’t is their existing jobs are far worse, typically far more difficult and dangerous farm jobs.That’s why when Foxconn used to post new iPhone assembly jobs, Chinese would line up by thousands because an Apple assembly job is a ticket out of poverty. So if first world manufacturers left, your reducing third world workers choices back to the lower paying, much worse work they had before.