This is strange. I specifically asked you to go ahead and make a claim about slavery and support it. And then I asked you to post data instead of threatening to do it, but you’re still just threatening.
And that is why you need to show that trade is driving slavery. If slavery is ocurring independently of trade, then by slapping a tariff, you may not help the slaves, but you will hurt the economy. In general equilibrium, you may even make the condition of those slaves worse, if their owners switch to serving the domestic market instead, and decide to squeeze their slaves to keep their own profits constant.
Once again, I refute that I have lied about a single thing in my statements, or misrepresented what you’re saying.
On the contrary, using US trade power to try and fix complex local issues * is * stuffing a solution down their throats, and a solution by which you’ll likely end up harming more people than you help, including the ones you want to help.
ETA: Didn’t notice he was suspended. BnS, I think you’re a good poster, but it’s unfortunate that you’ve become so agitated in your responses in this thread. We can continue the conversation when you’re back and calmer.
What China practices is NOT “free trade”. China ia a mercantalist power; it wants to buy raw materials, and export finished goods. It will price its goods low enough to drive any competition out of business. that is why you cannot make shoes in the USA anymore-a Chinese maker will drive you out of business. Brazil is finding the same thing out, the hard way. Brazil (by virtue of low wages and a huge leather supply) made shoes up untill about 10 years ago-now their shoe factories are closing, as cheap imports from China destroy their market. Why did Apple close its American plants? because it could make stuff cheaper in China-because there are no worker safty, environmental, and consumer protection laws in China.
this will continue, until mass unemployement in the West drives a change.
botsgotme is, like so many people, in dire need of looking up the concept of comparative advantage. I realize it’s not the easiest concept in the world to grasp - it took me awhile - but, jeez, guys, discussing free trade without really, really solidly grasping comparative advantage is kind of like discussing space exploration without having the first idea what gravity is.
If the USA can’t export shoes because they’re cheaper to make in China, logically the USA should not be able to export anything. It does, though. Why is that?
It doesn’t work that way. Look up ‘comparative advantage’ as RickJay suggests. Probably wouldn’t hurt several posters in this thread to do so, in fact.
On a related topic, I understand that Trump, if elected, will force Apple to move it’s facilities back to the US (somehow…no doubt making them pay for the Great Wall of America along with Mexico). Even leaving aside the fact that he couldn’t do this by fiat at President, do you understand why it would be a bad idea? Someone should have Trump look up ‘comparative advantage’ as well, plus give him a quick tutorial on economics 101 and the benefits of free trade as well as some of the issues with attempts at trade protectionism such as he seems to be advocating.
The disruption and job loss as a result of free trade is nowhere near the same thing as disruptions due to technological advances. Technological advances (up until very recently) created more jobs than they took away. The main culprit in why technological advances no longer create more jobs than they destroy is because companies like Apple create the iphone here in the USA and then manufacture them in China. It would be like inventing the car to obsolete buggy whip makers and then manufacturing the cars in China so that the buggy whip maker has nowhere to go when he loses his job.
I DON’T think that the answer is to close our borders but the combination of technology and outsourcing is progressing at a very rapid pace, too rapidly for our work force to adapt to and digest. I don’t know what the answer is but I remain open to argument against trade deals, especially trade deals that are good for diplomacy but bad for American workers.
China has both a comparative advantage in factory labor (its what they do best) and an absolute advantage in factory labor (they do it better than anyone else). When labor is involved, you can’t just use your econ 101 rules anymore. You can’t just look at labor as simply another factor of production.
I wonder at what point in the thread people will start referring to objective facts.
The current unemployment rate in the United States is 5.5%, which is not high by historical standards and is not rising. If the workforce is unable to adapt, why is that?
Well I assume the free trade argument to that is that the U.S. has to seek it’s comparitive advantage in an area that doesn’t require factories.
So the problem is finding the niche. Should the government have no role at all in finding and swiftly moving into that niche? ie Can’t government subsidies or tariffs aid our move into the comparative advantage balance?
Well, there are all sorts of reasons why you might protect an industry. For everything from incubation (if ,for example, we wanted to start manufacturing mobile phones), to national security (oil, food, heavy machine manufacturing), to cultural significance (the French wine industry).
Some of these protections are valid and some are not. Can we place large barriers to trade on imported phones in order to provide a little breathing room for domestic manufacturers of mobile phones? In order to be competitive with the current manufacturers, we would need pretty significant barriers to trade.
If you include the people who lost their jobs and have given up (cannot find work), the true UE rate is probably over 20%. Plus, this rate you quote doesn’t include underemployment (like graduate engineers working at WALMART). The truth is, the loss of manufacturing jobs means that people will have to settle for low paying/low benefit service jobs. Meanwhile, we ship trillions to China every year, to buy stuff we could easily make here.
There is about $5 of labor that goes into assembling an Iphone in China. It would cost at least three times as much and up to 10 times as much here.
Many of the components are also made overseas and require an almost dedicated company town to create the components. We used to do this in cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh. I don’t see why we can’t build these sort of towns again.
And as far as the unemployment rate is concerned, as long as they haven’t shifted the goal posts I don’t see why we need to use different measures of unemployment than we have since the great depression to measure the state of the labor economy.
Let me ask you something. Let’s pretend for a moment that you could force US companies to manufacture stuff that’s made in China and elsewhere right here in the good old USA. Do you envision that this would mean that those jobs paying a few dollars an hour would come here, or do you envision that good, high paying jobs with good benefits would come here? Personally, I envision that what would REALLY happen is neither…instead, assuming those companies didn’t go belly up, the ‘jobs’ would be done by robots and automated systems. What are your thoughts?
I don’t think that’s a completely fair response. While we should compare like to like, underemployment and those who’ve dropped out of the labour market are completely valid statistics to look at when measuring the economy. They give a fuller picture and shouldn’t be discarded because they didn’t collect those stats in the 40’s.
Both of these statements are simplistic, wrong, and the former demonstrates you don’t know what comparative advantage is. “Factory labor” isn’t a thing you trade overseas.
You might not trade labor if you mean put it in a box and ship it in a container to be ordered from Amazon as a discrete unit. But to think that a country or other region does not have comparative advantage in production or service because of more rational labor pricing seems off.
I wouldn’t make such a strong statement. It’s true that you generally think in terms of comparative advantage in terms of products, but it’s not outlandish to think of ‘factory labour’, or more broadly, the manufacturing environment, itself as a product, especially given that firms are ‘shopping’ for a cheap and convenient manufacturing environment when outsourcing.
