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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

Did companies outsource due to greed or did US consumers select for price forcing them to outsource to compete? Or both?

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Intel's gross profit margins have been over 50% for most of the past 15 years[1].

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/profit-...

Trade policy was set entirely by the elites, not consumers.

Okay, so did the elites "choose" that trade policy out of greed or because consumers were selecting for price? Trade policy also doesn't force anyone to outsource.

The elites choose that trade policy because it is efficient (specialisation), and because the prevailing wisdom since WW2 is if you trade with someone you don't war with them, so US heavily encouraged global trade.

>The elites choose that trade policy because it is efficient (specialisation)

Idealist nonsense, offshoring of manufacturing capacity from highly developed countries with large union penetration to countries with lower labor costs and more lax worker protections has literally nothing to do with comparative advantage and everything to do with enabling ever more brutal exploitation of labor and higher profit margins

After WWII, it was imperative that the US support free trade, especially if it meant taking a loss- all of their allies had had their industrial bases bombed out. Pressing the advantage forever would have been churlish, shortsighted, and disastrous for anti-Communism. So we have this very necessary, but outdated, free trade at all costs intellectual superstructure that we're still stuck in. Probably in another 20 years we'll be out of that, when the last of the old guard retires.

Consumers always want to pay less are you dense?

hilarious that someone downvoted this; I guess it's squarely our fault after all for not exclusively buying from the Made In America computer chips aisle at Best Buy :(

Did the neoliberal lobby block “protectionist” legislation? Did income inequality balloon in the US while Chinese wages exploded?

I don't know why you are asking questions instead of making statements, but yes and yes.

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