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Comment by ja30278 | Hacker News Reader

Enjoy _your_ third world economy, free from pesky pollutant-causing industry and manufacturing.

The poster has correctly identified the value proposition that causes companies to locate their manufacturing facilities elsewhere, and points out (also correctly) that making our tax codes as unfriendly to business as our labor laws will only encourage _those_ bits of the business to relocate as well.

You cannot have all of:

   * high wages for manufacturing workers
   * cheap products for consumers
   * high taxes on business
   * large profits that make it attractive to operate a company.

You would probably respond by saying that you'd prefer higher priced products and low-profit corporations, to which I'd reply that:

   * cheap products for consumers = higher standard of living. 
   * higher profit potential = more business growth.

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The corporatist sociopaths will say "Even the poorest among us can buy [a bunch of stupid cheap shit], surely our standard of living is high!" Wake up: standard of living isn't a bunch of cheap shit.

If instead of people spending $28.73 on a cheap toaster at Wal-Mart every 3 years, they spent $150 on a toaster every 20 years, the cost of labor would become much less of a problem. People are conditioned from birth by marketing and advertising that these cheap pieces of shit are really good deals.

There are enough examples of manufacturing companies that have a shred of decency improving their efficiency through process design and intelligence that I don't buy it. But, of course, it's much easier and profitable in the short-term to find some people on the other side of the planet you'll never have to meet. iSupply estimated that it costs $6.50 to assemble the iPhone 3G -- labor, equipment, management, everything. Is the cost of labor in Ohio (at $49/hour) really a problem for Honda?

Unemployed consumers don't consume.

* cheap products for consumers = higher standard of living. IIRC, consumer products are about 18% of a typical household budget. Housing, healthcare, and education are the majority.

For the millions now with ZERO income, even Chinese-made Wal*Mart crap is unaffordable. Yet the unionized workers of the 1950s - 1970's somehow purchased cars, household products, and clothing like domestically-made Levis blue jeans WITHOUT slave labor from repressive countries and without borrowing trillions fro those same countries.

I will gladly trade somewhat higher consumer prices for confidence that I will be employable in safe conditions at a middle-class wage for the duration of my normal working life.

And I'm very pro-manufacturing: but the environmental externalities must be mitigated and properly priced: my health is very valuable to me, even if there's no clear market price for it.

Yet the unionized workers of the 1950s - 1970's somehow purchased cars, household products, and clothing like domestically-made Levis blue jeans WITHOUT slave labor from repressive countries and without borrowing trillions fro those same countries.

That was only possible because that time period was a window in which our technological superiority made it possible to provide the average working man with that standard of living. That period is coming quickly to a close.

Uh, no. Aside from petroleum issues, it was a SUSTAINABLE CLOSED SYSTEM of trade among similarly-developed countries with similar standards. This could continue even if innovation had suddenly stopped in 1985.

Far more sustainable than the present, which involves unsustainable personal debts, unsustainable trade deficits, and unsustainable federal borrowing.

But please note that CENTRAL POINT OF THE ARTICLE explains WHY our technological superiority lessened, rather than moving exponentially further ahead.

It's only a closed system if you ignore the resources and cheap bottom-tier labor the first world extracted from the third world at a fraction of their potential value. The U.S. in particular was very active in this time period propping up puppet regimes around the third world in order to get cheap access to their raw materials and labor. The world has never been a closed system.

Please don't SHOUT so much.

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