If you move all your expertise and factories to another country, train the staff there how to use the technology, and school them in our universities, then you have to be pretty dumb not to expect those people to use that knowledge not to build their own technology in the future. We gave it away.
Our response it's not to design and build our own better technology, but to pump money into the military industrial complex instead to force other nations to heal. Which is a big earner for the military industrial complex investors.
We couldn't have done everything more wrong, including not investing in green energy, which would have paid off extremely well because everyone wants low cost, clean fuel.
Our leading 'job creators' and 'entrepreneurs' are not so smart after all. Or perhaps they were rather cute, as they made themselves a lot of money out of it - selling the nation down the river. Paul Craig Roberts says they should be put on trail for treasin. It just goes to show how the market can get it all wrong.
Trump's trade war points the finger in the wrong direction. China behaved normally; corporate CEOs betrayed us
China is not “stealing” American jobs.
President Trump loves to blame China for the job losses that have devastated American workers under globalization. But the truth is that Trump is blaming the wrong party. Trump’s reckless trade war against China is misguided and amounts to a colossal charade that will not solve the actual problem.
Yes, it is true that numerous American manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas to China, thereby leaving American workers jobless and suffering. But China did not steal these jobs.
No. These jobs were given to China. It was all legal and legitimate. China merely accepted the gift.
What would anyone expect China to do? Accepting these jobs was a perfectly rational course of action.
China was an underdeveloped nation with a large population of poor people willing to work for a fraction of the hourly wages of American workers. And then corporations came along and presented China with an attractive offer: We would like to build manufacturing plants in China and hire droves of your unemployed people to work there. What was China supposed to do? Naturally, China said yes.
This is hardly stealing.
Information Clearing House
No, Mr. President: China didn't steal our jobs. Corporate America gave them away
You mentioned Paul Craig Roberts. In this recent article (https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/05/14/the-tariff-issue/), PCR makes the point that US global corporations are responsible for lost American jobs, not the Chinese, and sets forth an interesting idea about changing the way US corporations are taxed as a solution to bringing jobs back to the US. He says this solution is better than tarriffs because the cost of the tarriff will just be passed on to the US consumer in the form of higher prices. What I don't understand is why wouldn't his objection to tarriffs also apply to his tax idea -- that is, why wouldn't the higher taxes he proposes be passed on to the US consumer just like the tarriffs? I am not sure that I see any difference between tarriffs and taxes in this regard. What am I misssing?
ReplyDeleteI don't buy this argument it takes two to tango in greed and that's exactly what happened the Chinese Communist Party made it attractive to deprive Western workers of jobs in order to provide Chinese workers with them. Now there's a rise in nationalist parties in the West with Trump leading the way to get votes by jacking up tariffs against Chinese imports mostly because of Chinese currency rigging but also not operating a level playing field in global trading. 17th century Western Liberal thinking based on the Possessive Individualist beliefs of Hobbes and Locke created this unbalanced situation. The ideology is now being hoist by its own petard!
ReplyDeleteIf US businesses were ethically financed then the profits from less expensive foreign goods and labor would be much more justly shared.
ReplyDeleteBut who believes in ethical finance? Not any MMT proponents that I've heard. (Nor the Austrians either.)
And what's next, tariffs on domestic robots and automation?
I remember what PCR said now, it was to tax companies that take jobs abroad and lower taxes on those companies that keep jobs at home. This would make it less profitable to offshore jobs, although I think a taffif may do the same thing.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is the global hegemony of Neoliberal ideology (Western Liberalism if you prefer) doesn't contain an economic justice component.
ReplyDelete