When you lay people off and they’re earning $0 will you sell
a) more
b) less
c) the same
number of goods?
From now on this will be the auto-response when you ask this question. At least until I get bored of your inanity.
Oh damn, I forgot to add.
So if we send all those iPod jobs overseas and Foxconn workers ask for a raise, and their wages approach ours, and iPod production moves to Vietnam where their workers eventually ask for raises, then it moves to Africa, then India, then Eastern Europe…
At some point the whole world is going to be asking for normal wages and you’re going to run out of places to offshore. At that time you might as well bring production back here.
Of course this’ll be 50 years and an entire ruined American working class later, but iPods will then go back to $1500 apiece because you’ve run out of cheap labor!
Hear that buzzing sound, black knight? It’s the sound of your argument short circuiting.
But I guess we should just wait until standards of living increase around the world while ours go into decline for the next what… 50 years? After which wages around the world will be too expensive to offshore work to them. By then we’ll be a third world nation and they’ll outsource to us. :rolleyes:
My last two jobs have included a healthy amount of service contract work for foreign customers. They have been good customers, we are glad to have them.
Now, if we accept that having foreign customers is a good thing, then we have to accept that we may also have foreign suppliers, contractors and the like as well. And this isn’t a bad thing either - it is just business.
My father once got word of opportunities for steel mill management in Serbia. Instead of looking more closely into these he chose to work in Kentucky for a few years. I don’t think he got bent out of shape that steel was being made in Serbia - he accepted long ago that steel is a worldwide market, and he carved out his little niche in it.
This is the second time I’ve answered this “argumentum ad populum” excuse.
In this particular case your use of “argumentum ad populum” is little more than the delusion that you’re smarter than 86% of the country.
So now you have to ask yourself… is this level of opposition, which has GROWN dramatically in the last 10 years, because you have failed to get your point across properly, or because people see your argument for what it really is?
I think that people are being rather hard on the OP. If what he is saying about Americans opposing offshoring is accurate, then something should be done. Also, I think that most Americans if asked will say that they oppose offshoring.
This is the problem though: Saying that they oppose offshoring and really opposing offshoring are two different things. Various inputs to production (usually labor) have differing cost structures in various parts of the world. People may SAY that they oppose offshoring, but when they shop, they choose more affordable, foreign-manufactured goods, as opposed to the more expensive local or domestic fare. This makes “organization”, not difficult, but utterly unnecessary. Those people who want offshoring will materially support it while those who don’t want it will deny it the resources it needs. Offshoring will exist in on a limited scale, a cottage industry really, for that small niche that prefers it. Or, if massive numbers of people prefer to increase their purchasing power at the expense of domestic industry, that is what will happen.
This is what fascinates me so about economics. It provides a window into people’s values. You can have your philosophy, religion and politics. People will SAY all kinds of things about what they believe or what they value. But, if you really want to know what’s important to them, observe what it takes to separate them from their hard earned cash.
Most Americans, if asked, would also say they oppose inhumane farming methods. Doesn’t keep them from going to McDonald’s. Nor does their opposition to outsourcing keep them from buying Chinese goods or patronizing businesses which employ only American workers.
Most Americans also think it’s wrong to cheat on a significant other or to break the law, but they’ll all do it.
The link doesn’t work, but reading from what you quoted:
So, we have a poll but we don’t know how it was conducted and what the actual questions were (the answers to this might have been in the link that doesn’t work) conducted by the Wall Street Journal and NBC.
So…far from 86 percent of the responders to the survey (which doesn’t equate to 86% of the entire population of the US) opposing outsourcing, 85% think it has contributed to ‘economic sluggishness’. Those two things aren’t exactly the same.
In short and as militantly unsurprising you either didn’t read what you quoted, are deliberately trying to take it out of context to ‘prove’ your irrational point (I vote for this one), or you are too stupid to be able to read and comprehend what you are reading and make a rational argument from it (I’m not ruling this one out…hell, it could be a combination of all 3).
This is also not synonymous with your assertion that the majority of American’s want tariffs imposed. Really, this article (at least the parts you quoted) does nothing to bolster your case.
Well, that’s YOUR fantasy. Nations already outsource to us, moron.
86% of American’s believe that offshoring has made the economy sluggish. They are mostly wrong, since what’s actually made the economy sluggish is THE FUCKING RECESSION WE ARE IN, but they aren’t fully wrong…outsourcing has played a role as well. Who is wrong is, well, you, because you can’t read…or you think we can’t.
The guy has been here only a few months, and every thread he opens is the same. Outsourcing = bad. That’s one of the reasons everyone is being “rather hard” on him. One trick ponies get to be annoying fast.
Exactly. Good luck trying to convince the OP of that.
A more meaningful poll would go something like this: Most economists [which is true] think that the price consumer goods would increase by about X% if we eliminated outsourcing and imposed tariffs on imported goods. Would you support such a measure?
If asked, most American’s would like free health care as well. It’s all in how you ask the questions…you can get ‘most American’s’ to agree on a lot of things if you word your poll correctly.
That said, go back and read what the OP’s cites ACTUALLY say. At least in the parts he quoted there is nothing that says that most Americans are opposed to offshoring or outsourcing.
Exactly. There are a lot of examples of people saying they are opposed to all sorts of things (alcohol, drug use, porn, Martha Stewart), but whatever they say, they vote with their pocketbooks, and the reality is often different than what they will write down in a poll. Consider…if people were REALLY opposed to offshoring they wouldn’t buy products made outside of the US. There have been several companies in the past who tried to use this strategy to get Americans to buy American goods and services (especially years ago when the actual outsourcing craze was really rolling). For the most part they failed, because people buy more based on price or perceived quality than they do on where an item is manufactured. If US companies could convince a large enough number of Americans to buy based solely on where an item is produced and manufactured then you can bet they would have tried to do that instead of moving some manufacturing to low wage high volume countries.
The thing that’s funny to me about LeAssALope’s schtick about ‘86% of Americans oppose offshoring’ is that in a single poll you COULD get that many people to respond in that way. Offshoring has been an on again off again bugaboo used by and demonized by both the right and left (certain segments of both) to inspire fear in their faithful followers for years now. It’s an emotionally charged subject, and most people are, frankly, ignorant of how trade actually works, let alone the economic factors involved in manufacturing today. I don’t know why people think that you can get some sort of profound wisdom on technical questions like this one by asking regular people…it’s always been a mystery why people would take such polls as gospel or think that they indicate some sort of profound insight into such questions.
If asked, I have no doubt that a large percentage of Americans would happily indicated that they believe in aliens, for instance. That doesn’t mean that aliens are real, merely that a large part of the American people BELIEVE they are real. If asked, most Americans would say that nuclear power is bad. This is similar to the outsourcing thing…Americans have been told for decades that nuclear power is bad and dangerous, so they believe it is so. That doesn’t make it so, just indicates they believe it is.
One real question I have though in all of this. If cornes de lapin cul is ‘shit for brains’, and several posters in this thread are ‘turd burglars’ then does that mean you guys are stealing Jac’s brains (such as they are)? So…is he getting stupider as the thread goes along, or is that really relative (i.e. it’s hard to get much below absolute zero)? Also, what are you guys doing with Jac’s brains? Using them for fertilizer? Putting them in paper bags and lighting them on fire then knocking on Gonzo’s door? Inquiring minds want to know…
And here’s the thing. Let’s say we put tariffs on Chinese goods. Whether that would bring jobs back to the US is debatable, but lets say it does. Who is going to buy these new high priced items made here other than Americans (who can’t buy the lower priced items)? Hint: No one. So now, the rest of the developed world has a source of cheap labor and products that the US has excluded itself from. All of our goods now become more expensive, and our exports decline. We become an isolated trading unit with the rest of the world at a significant advantage.
People might not like the idea that we live in a world economy, but you can’t change that fact by hiding under a rock, or erecting a huge trading wall around the country. The rest of the world isn’t going to join the US as we collective throw ourselves off the cliff.