The thing with China imo is that part of the reason they’ve been so attractive for manufacturing has been that it’s cheaper there, and the reason that it’s cheaper there has been lower wages and lower safety standards. That’s bad for pretty much everyone except for companies making stuff in China, and consumers getting stuff cheaper than is probably viable with more ethical labor practices (and even then it’s not really much of a benefit to them, because those people need jobs too and so the negative impact there offsets that). It is sadly ironic that a country who’s stated ideology originally claimed to be in the interests of labor (not that it actually was, but they talked that way), has made it’s competitive advantage in the global economy pretty much be being a way around labor protections and unions.
Something I could see being potentially useful, then, would be a tariff policy that was roughly “if you make stuff using labor that’s significantly lower paid than our wages, or with worse safety standards, we raise the price to be around what it would be if it had been made to our labor standards, so that there is no advantage in not keeping things fair for our workforce and yours”. I’ve never really been a fan of things like tariffs, because I know that they mainly just make things more expensive and can reduce pressure to compete by domestic companies, but at the same time, the current system both makes the US dependent on goods made by exploited foreign workers as most people don’t have good enough jobs to afford much better than that which is made cheap by that exploitation, and incentives those foreign countries to keep their people trapped in those conditions and not raise standards, to avoid losing that competitive advantage to another country that does not.
Yeah that is something that bothers me. A lot of the affordability isn’t necessarily because of lower quality imo, but because they pay shit wages. It’s why labor is cheaper in China and companies want to outsource there. They don’t pay their workers adequately or have the and level of workplace protections.
My biggest problem with China is that they want to sell to us, but won’t allow us to sell to them and they are stealing IPs left and right.
I’m all for lowering prices for consumers, but not at the expense of enriching the tyrannical CCP.
We need to improve and encourage trade with governments that believe in democracy.
Russia and China ain’t it.
The thing with China imo is that part of the reason they’ve been so attractive for manufacturing has been that it’s cheaper there, and the reason that it’s cheaper there has been lower wages and lower safety standards. That’s bad for pretty much everyone except for companies making stuff in China, and consumers getting stuff cheaper than is probably viable with more ethical labor practices (and even then it’s not really much of a benefit to them, because those people need jobs too and so the negative impact there offsets that). It is sadly ironic that a country who’s stated ideology originally claimed to be in the interests of labor (not that it actually was, but they talked that way), has made it’s competitive advantage in the global economy pretty much be being a way around labor protections and unions.
Something I could see being potentially useful, then, would be a tariff policy that was roughly “if you make stuff using labor that’s significantly lower paid than our wages, or with worse safety standards, we raise the price to be around what it would be if it had been made to our labor standards, so that there is no advantage in not keeping things fair for our workforce and yours”. I’ve never really been a fan of things like tariffs, because I know that they mainly just make things more expensive and can reduce pressure to compete by domestic companies, but at the same time, the current system both makes the US dependent on goods made by exploited foreign workers as most people don’t have good enough jobs to afford much better than that which is made cheap by that exploitation, and incentives those foreign countries to keep their people trapped in those conditions and not raise standards, to avoid losing that competitive advantage to another country that does not.
Yeah that is something that bothers me. A lot of the affordability isn’t necessarily because of lower quality imo, but because they pay shit wages. It’s why labor is cheaper in China and companies want to outsource there. They don’t pay their workers adequately or have the and level of workplace protections.