Re: The Brilliance of Moving US Manufacturing Jobs to China

With no regard for personal safety or the comfort of others, the Great
Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> blathered:

>On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:19:21 +1000, Dr Zen <longhornster@xxxxxxxxx>
>wrote:
>
>>With no regard for personal safety or the comfort of others, the Great
>>Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> blathered:
>>
>>>On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 10:34:22 +1000, Dr Zen <longhornster@xxxxxxxxx>
>>>wrote:
>>>
>>>>With no regard for personal safety or the comfort of others, the Great
>>>>Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> blathered:
>>>>
>>>>>On 29 Nov 2005 09:40:23 -0800, "Hip Liz" <euphonius@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>Dr Zen wrote:
>>>>>>> With no regard for personal safety or the comfort of others, the Great
>>>>>>> Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> blathered:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> >On 28 Nov 2005 16:33:18 -0800, "Hip Liz" <euphonius@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>>>> >
>>>>>>> >>Josh Hill wrote:
>>>>>>> >>> On 28 Nov 2005 09:45:55 -0800, "Pies de Arcilla" <dearcilla@xxxxxxxxx>
>>>>>>> >>> wrote:
>>>>>>> >>> >
>>>>>>> >>> >Josh Hill wrote:
>>>>>>> >>> >> On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:06:53 +1000, Dr Zen <longhornster@xxxxxxxxx>
>>>>>>> >>> >> wrote:
>>>>>>> >>> >>
>>>>>>> >>> >> Talk about whooshes. Yeah, the economic elite benefits wherever the
>>>>>>> >>> >> goods are made; but workers benefit only if they are given the tokens
>>>>>>> >>> >> to buy the goods, and that will not happen, in the long term, if they
>>>>>>> >>> >> are not adding value themselves.
>>>>>>> >>
>>>>>>> >>That's right. As a party to the migration of jobs globally, I have to
>>>>>>> >>agree that Americans who are too lazy to get educated deserve to lose
>>>>>>> >>their jobs to Asians who are not.
>>>>>>> >
>>>>>>> >Factories rarely move abroad because the workers are more educated.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> It's astonishing that he can even think they do!
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I know they do not - not for factory jobs. I know that American
>>>>>>factory workers are more productive than Chinese factory workers. But
>>>>>>they also cost a lot more. I should have been more clear who I was
>>>>>>talking about. India and China are graduating engineers at much higher
>>>>>>rates than the U.S., and as one who hires engineers, I see immigrants
>>>>>>taking jobs that U.S. locals are not qualified for. I also see design
>>>>>>centers popping up offshore, often under the direction of folks who
>>>>>>learned their trade here and then went back home. This grows the
>>>>>>middle class in those countries to the detriment of the middle class
>>>>>>here. I am not sympathetic to those who lose out because they didn't
>>>>>>get a useful education.
>>>>>
>>>>>That's a real problem, particularly for the future, but as Zen points
>>>>>out, it's far from the most important problem facing American workers
>>>>>today. We have, after all, no shortage of highly skilled computer
>>>>>programmers, but their jobs are now being exported wholesale to India.
>>>>>And -- getting back to your point -- are we then to blame today's
>>>>>American students for shying away from computer science?
>>>>>
>>>>>I think we also have to be realistic about /how/ we can provide
>>>>>opportunity. A few highly motivated and educated groups aside,
>>>>>immigrant children and the first-generation children of immigrant
>>>>>parents don't as a rule move directly to a university education, and
>>>>>despite all the blather about leaving no child behind, they probably
>>>>>will not any time soon. These kids have historically received their
>>>>>opportunities by working in plants designed and run by those who have,
>>>>>and when those plants are sited abroad, they lose those opportunities.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Immigrants be blowed. You also have to provide opportunity for the
>>>>classes that would previously have worked in factories etc. Including
>>>>those who are not actually kids, but have worked in manufacturing for
>>>>some years. They don't suddenly become educated and productive, you
>>>>know. It's very easy to say that they can simply go to university and
>>>>become educated, but is that true? Can they get finance? Is there any
>>>>block on their willingness to take out loans?
>>>>
>>>>Isn't that something the government, which is supposed to be running
>>>>the economy, should pay for anyway?
>>>
>>>There's no simple answer here. I will say this: we don't have a huge
>>>number of factory workers hankering to go to college: higher education
>>>has long been much more readily available here than it has in Europe.
>>>
>>
>>That isn't an answer.
>
>Because there isn't one: opportunities differ from state to state,
>each of which has its own system of public higher education, and the
>Federal loan and scholarship programs that allow the poor to go to
>college have been cut back by the Republicans. So whether or not
>someone can afford to go to college is now highly dependent on
>individual circumstances.
>

Yes. The question was is that how it should be?

>>>>>>> >Nor do programming jobs. They move because trade barriers have been
>>>>>>> >dismantled, labor abroad is cheap, technology and political
>>>>>>> >developments make the move feasible, and our idiot government lets
>>>>>>> >foreign governments expose their workers to hazardous conditions, pay
>>>>>>> >allow starvation wages, ban unions, pollute at will, subsidize,
>>>>>>> >protect, and dump, and keep our currency artificially high and their
>>>>>>> >artificially low, while it saddles American businesses with
>>>>>>> >outlandishly high health care costs.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Programmers do not interface with hazardous conditions.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>How do you propose our idiot government not "let" foreign governments
>>>>>>expose their workers? Send in the Marines?
>>>>>
>>>>>I wrote this, not Zen, and it would have been best to reply directly
>>>>>to my post.
>>>>>
>>>>>That being said, we can ban products or erect tariffs on the products
>>>>>of countries that don't meet minimal standards. Congress has already
>>>>>done this for products made with child labor. Such laws can't always
>>>>>be enforced, since individual violations can be difficult to detect,
>>>>>but neither are they without effect.
>>>>
>>>>They don't have very much effect, as child labour laws have shown. The
>>>>companies lobby to have the laws watered down as far as possible and
>>>>then simply deny they are employing children.
>>>
>>>So get tougher: the Chinese and Indians need us a hell of a lot more
>>>than we need them.
>>
>>You just aren't living in 2005, are you, dude? The Chinese like having
>>you but *need* you? If they thought you were going anywhere, they'd
>>replace you.
>
>In the long term, no doubt, but the Chinese economy is still highly
>export-oriented, and they run a trade deficit with other Asian
>countries.

Yes. They'd be investing in Laos if they thought you'd stop buying,
man.

> We're China's second largest trading partner, after the EU,
>and the main source of their surplus, the EU being the second largest.
>And our trade makes up enough of their economy that were we to reduce
>trade with China, their economy would suffer terribly.

You would be in the tank though! That's what you don't get. You're not
in a position to threaten China over trade. You *need* them. They
don't need you.

> Which is why
>they won't even let their currency float for fear of the effect on
>economic growth; the Chinese government would rather lend the US vast
>sums of money than get more for their products and see that growth
>stall.

They don't need to float their currency. If they needed cheaper
imports, they would do so.

They are pursuing their own interest, not yours. They don't see you as
partners because they are well aware that you don't see them that way.
They also realise you are in the habit of fucking people who trust
you.

>>> The reason that doesn't happen isn't that it can't,
>>>but that the greedsters that run things don't want it to.
>>
>>Can you see any place in what I said that I contradicted that?
>
>No. I assumed you'd agree.
>
>> I don't
>>believe ethics are impossible in trade, but they sure aren't going to
>>happen while corporations call the shots.
>
>>From what I've seen, if a businessman behaves too ethically, his
>competitors will more often than not undercut him and put him out of
>business.

Yes, but one needn't consider them virtuous for doing so.

> I think it's no accident that monopolies like the old AT&T
>or Xerox tend to treat their workers better than companies in highly
>competitive markets -- and couldn't compete, or maintain the same
>worker benefits, when their monopolies ended.
>

Yes. One has to ask why the government, who represent the people,
thought it was in the interests of the workers to end the monopolies.

Ho hum.

It's interesting that when our government privatised all the state
monopolies and allowed competition, they told us we'd benefit from
choice.

How? My bills are three, four times what they were when I bought my
power, gas and phone from the state.

Yes, there's competition. Here in SE Queensland there are two power
companies. Do they run cutthroat competition at very low prices? Do
they ***!

>>>>>>How? The public sector does not produce any wealth.
>>>>>
>>>>>Not really true -- the public sector builds important infrastructure
>>>>>like roads and airports, and provides essential services -- but
>>>>>overall, I agree with your point.
>>>>
>>>>If you know of any other means of creating wealth than building things
>>>>and providing services, I'd like to know what.
>>>
>>>Dude, I specifically mentioned infrastructure and essential services.
>>>You can't live entirely off roads, airports, and fire protection.
>>
>>You won't get very rich without them.
>
>Of course not. They're important, and they're one of the reasons the
>Republicans who insist that cutting taxes is the cure for all ills are
>full of it. But that wasn't the issue.

Yes, it is the issue.

True wealth comes from material goods. (The mistake you made in
another post was to insist that an economy must depend on goods, which
is not true.) They don't get themselves out of the gorund and they
don't build their own roads to get to market.

>
>>>
>>>> Hey, and guess what, in
>>>>providing that infrastructure and those services, the government
>>>>*employs people*. They get *paid*. That means the wealth that the
>>>>government has sequestered *goes to the people* and not to *some rich
>>>>*** who employs people when it enriches him and sacks them when it
>>>>doesn't*.
>>>
>>>Well, you know, that's what unions are for, and progressive taxation.
>>>The things we used to have.
>>
>>Dude, you don't need to tell me. You're the guy doesn't know how the
>>public sector creates wealth.
>
>Dude, I reiterate what I said: the public sector is not, in a
>non-socialist country, sufficient to create wealth.

Is that what I said? No, it isn't. Nothing like it.

> It can't make up
>for the absence of manufacturing.

It can and has in several Western countries.

> It has a role in wealth creation, to
>be sure, but one can't clothe one's children in roads.

No, indeed, but one can clothe one's children in cheap Chinese clothes
that one buys with the money one earns from building roads for the
government.

>>>>You may now employ the usual bull*** about how corporations
>>>>create jobs and thus wealth, and I will dismiss it readily by
>>>>explaining that per-dollar job creation (proper jobs, paying decent
>>>>wages, not bull*** casualised semi-employment) is much higher in the
>>>>public sector, because far from its being the case that the rich
>>>>invest in job creation, they in fact invest in increasing wealth,
>>>>which is not the same thing -- often the opposite, because the
>>>>foremost means of increasing the wealth of a company, as any fule kno,
>>>>is to cut costs. Cut costs means, all too often, sack workers.
>>>
>>>Unfortunately, there's another word for that: inefficiency.
>>
>>Another word for which thing exactly?
>
>All of your words, Zen. The public sector typically, though not
>always, employees several people to do the work that one could do in
>the private sector.

Good. More people employed, more people with money. More people with
money, more customers. All good.

> That lowers productivity, and productivity is,
>without splitting the point too finely, wealth.
>

Stupid fucker.

>>You know, efficiency is not really the thing to worship, Josh. Because
>>what counts is what you are aiming at being efficient in. Corporations
>>aim at efficiency in enriching shareholders;
>
>Invisible hand, dude: when capitalism works right, they do that by
>making products that people want and selling them for less than the
>next guy.

Invisible hand, my arse. Capitalists make products that they can
induce a desire for and sell them for as much as they can get. Much of
capitalism consists of trying to convince the public that what they
are selling is *not* the same product the next guy makes.

If our economies consisted solely of trade in apples, Smith would be
so much more useful as a guide.

>They also have a tendency to cut the worker's pay to the
>point where he can't afford the goods he makes, but Keynes taught us
>how to deal with that; we aren't talking about pure 19th-century
>capitalism here, which really does impoverish the typical worker, but
>a somewhat syndicalistic hybrid.
>

Keynes is sadly not advising the US government, or those of any other
Western nation. Sometimes it seems that Lucifer is.

>> governments, one would
>>hope, aim at efficiency in providing certain things to those they
>>serve. Efficiency is not a catch-all measure: you can't necessarily
>>measure the second by the first. You might say the government "wastes"
>>billions on jobs that do not produce anything.
>>
>>But the billions are not "wasted". They were harvested as income tax,
>>and are redistributed as income. So long as the government does that
>>efficiently -- it should be clear what that would involve -- the
>>notion of efficiency in effect in business is not really very
>>appropriate.
>
>Income redistribution is effective only if there are enough goods to
>be redistributed.

You don't even know what you are saying. We've ascertained that access
to goods is not the problem. Nations do not simply trade apples for
pears, you halfwit.

>>I don't know why ordinary working people should *want* an economy that
>>efficiently transfers wealth to the already wealthy. Not that it
>>actually does. It's not efficient and it's not the vaunted free
>>market. Far from it.
>
>They should want it only if, on balance, it makes their lives better.

Better than what?

>Who cares if someone sails a yacht if the worker can drive a car? From
>what I've seen, the mixed capitalist system is sufficiently more
>efficient that, given some income redistribution, the higher economic
>output of capitalism does a better job of providing for the typical
>worker than the more equitable but less productive socialism.

Yes, you are able to think so because a/ you live in a rich, Western
country and not Bolivia and b/ you have no point of comparison. Where
nations have tried both socialism and untrammelled capitalism, in
practically every case, if not all, the people have generally done
worse under capitalism.


Dr Zen
"But let me tell you that I never planned
to let go of the hand that has been
clinging by its thick country skin
to my yellow country teeth" -- Ounsworth
http://gollyg.blogspot.com
.

Loading