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Comment by freejulian85 | Hacker News Reader

The fed has said that they use monetary policy to help “labor adjust to market forces.” This is what inflation does. It weakens the buying power of wage earners. Do it slowly enough and they won’t notice it happening. Our ancestors who fought in the labor movement for significant concessions from the capitalist class must be rolling in their grave at the state of the proletariat today. Promoting globalization while not also requiring counties we trade with have equivalent labor laws is just insane, yet people seem to love the idea of globalization and inflation. All I can do is shake my head.

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> Promoting globalization while not also requiring counties we trade with have equivalent labor laws is just insane

This should be an ideal, and I think we can agree on some basic level of human rights (no forced labor, for instance). But refusing to deal with countries who don’t adhere to our moral code would just lead to a bigger bifurcated market. As examples, we did this to Cuba and North Korea, yet neither of them have changed to meet our demands. Short story is that boycotts have limited power when the group you’re boycotting has an alternative.

Isn't there a salient difference between boycotting and not-enabling? I can understand your point that a boycott is not necessarily the tool to bring about change.

However, as China has so amply shown, there is a recipe they pioneered that others can now follow to engage globalization's benefits without dragging in the accompanying democratization precepts. In light of that, it is far from clear that globalization from now on will bring about the kinds of change liberal democracies desire to see. There may even be an argument to be made that China is leading the way to demonstrate how to co-opt most of the benefits of globalization, while blocking every attribute they deem subversive.

So if globalization has become just another tool to accelerate despotic/adverse power consolidation (and there is an argument to be made that there is adverse power developments even in "advanced" economies from globalization), boycotts aren't about/solely a moral action, and add a dimension as a realistic response to avoid further anti-pattern enablement.

I agree we shouldn’t directly sponsor immoral behavior.

I think we were naïve to believe that globalization would automatically expand democratic government, but don’t think it will automatically lead to a despotic one, either. A moral code exists on top of whatever form of commerce you engage in.

I suspect boycotts galvanize tyrants. They need an "us versus them" narrative to justify their actions and prosecution of their enemies. It provides a wonderful scapegoat for domestic issues too-- I suspect the Cuban government could write off mediocre economic growth for years as "hey, the biggest most obvious trading partner won't deal with us."

It's a lot harder to get people rallied against an "enemy" who supplies your food/favourite consumer goods.

> Requiring trade with countries with equivalent labor laws

That's impossible IMO.

A) Labor laws reflect local requirements, e.g. the agricultural / fisheries sector won't benefit from rigid work hours.

B) Labor is affected by more than laws, e.g. a weak currency affect the affordability of imports more than minimum wage.

C) Transshipment, e.g. Singapore / Vietnam makes skirting trade restrictions trivial.

Inflation? What's that? The inflation rate has been the lowest it's been since the early 1960s.

There's an inflation-unemployment trade-off. You want to ensure that there's never any inflation? Get used to regular periods of 10% unemployment.

It's time to rejoice then. We have deflation and stagnating wages at the same time.

Why is this being downvoted? I can see discussion growing out of this comment, and that's a good reason to not downvote.

People who support pro inflation monetary policy think they know more than those of us who still value the Austrian school of economics. They treat Keynes as settled fact.

Or maybe the Austrian economics fans are downvoting you for your suggestion of labor protectionist policies.

Oh, if you want to go that route, you shouldn't just rail against inflation. You should demand proper deflation. See https://mises.org/library/less-zero-case-falling-price-level...

You seem to hold a very curious combination of opinions? In favour of globally regulating labour markets (and threatening trade restrictions to enforce that), but also in favour of Austrian economics?

It pretty much is settled fact. There were some hold-outs, but we recreated the conditions of the Great Depression, and then we had a crash as large as the Great Depression. Countries pursued more or less Keynesian policies in response, and the countries that pursued the most Keynesian policies recovered the fastest. It's as close to an experimental test of Keynesianism as we're ever likely to see, and it came out in favor of Keynesianism.

Upvotes & downvotes here utterly mean nothing and often are mean-spirited and/or impulsive.

As a result, people become increasingly entrenched in using votes to promote certain ideologies or norms and attempt to hide or obscure competing or contrary views, often without even thinking, just party politics applied to every distinct idea spectrum.

Because it's standard inflation drivel. It's almost word to word the standard spiel that your old cranky uncle writes in their FB page. You can see the same logic with almost sentence to sentence several times a day in reddit discussions. Incidentally both left and right ideologues use the same reasoning.

It attributes too much blame for the monetary system, never attempting to quantize how much the alleged harm is caused by monetary system. If you dwell even little deeper you discover that it's not even wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

The original article can be described as "standard spiel that your old cranky uncle writes in their FB page"?

> Promoting globalization while not also requiring counties we trade with have equivalent labor laws is just insane, [...]

The American economy already suffers enough from having lots of complications like banning of low paying jobs.

No need to make their lives even harder and stop trading with them. Trade is good for everyone involved.

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