3 ms·
Living in America entails your daily expenses and significant portions of your tax money go to China and other dystopian dictatorships around the world. It's im
by robbedpeter 4y ago
Living in America entails your daily expenses and significant portions of your tax money go to China and other dystopian dictatorships around the world. It's implausible to live ethically - like the meme of personal recycling, the problem is corporations and regulatory capture. Citizens don't make a dent.
- onychomys 4y agoTrue, but just because I'm typing this on a machine made in Chinese sweatshops doesn't mean that I have to spend my days actively making their government more money. We can solve problems a little bit at a time even if bigger problems exist elsewhere, after all.
- robbedpeter 4y agoRight, but at some point it's like trying to keep back the tide with a pushbroom. If you're Elon, maybe you can get a big enough broom, or build a sea wall, but a million individuals with brooms are just going to be wasting their energy. The effort has to go towards corporate regulations and culture change. Ending slavery within the US took a civil war and we're still decades away (at least) from fixing the legislative echoes and civil rights issues. Influencing China to end their own slavery and civil rights abuses isn't feasible at an individual level, except through correcting the allowed business behaviors and relationships by imposing laws and changing the culture. America is incentivizing human rights abuses under its current system. We have an obligation to correct our behavior at the nation state level. Voting with wallets is no better than brooms on a beach. We need to vote for representatives that will fix the issue through international trade regulation.