by ET » Fri Nov 13, 2015 10:27 am
I suppose you won't acknowledge the role that any number of regulatory burdens imposed on American manufacturers by the "government is good" crowd may have played a significant role in "exporting" those so-called "American" jobs?
We live in global economy, not in the "Utopian" times of the 1950s or 1960s when most of the world was underdeveloped and/or laying in ruins from WWII and there really wasn't any other place to get goods other than "made in America". If GM or Ford or the "Evil Corporation of American" want to produce stuff and sell to the world, then they have all sorts of options. They can set up shop in America, Japan, China, South Korea, Malaysia, Latin America and a host of other places.
That's fine if you want to impose any number of regulations to "benefit" the American worker - Obamacare or single-payer, paid family leave, free college, free daycare, free this and free that - but apparently you and a good number of other folks can't face the fact that companies have options these days. When the labor and regulatory costs of your collectivist mindset make it noncompetitive to employ Americans to produce goods to ship around the world, then it makes perfect business sense to seek to produce goods elsewhere in order to stay competitive with businesses around the world.
We can have our EPA, EEOC, SEC, Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, Obamacare or any other number of regulatory requirements that you and your buddies at commondreams can think up, but folks have options. If you want to drop a few million in regulatory costs on "Evil Corporation of America" because you think everybody ought to get this or that for "free" or that the EPA should squeeze out the next .00000001% of mercury from drinking water or that inexpensive energy produced by coal should be made significantly more expensive to produce, then Mr. Big Bad CEO of ECA can run the numbers and decide that it is more advantageous to produce widgets in Mexico and ship them to China for sale, because making them in America with all it's "government is good" business costs is stupid when his competition is making them in India and shipping their widgets to China for sale.
There may be certain regulatory costs we are willing to bear and accept the trade-off in lost jobs/manufacturing capability because the benefit to us is deemed more desirable than the costs (such as some basic set of air and water rules, food inspections, etc.), but I imagine what folks like the commondreamers seek is protectionism - they wish to be able to lay whatever regulatory burdens they deem "good" on corporations and then have protectionist measures in place so that companies won't find it economically feasible to move elsewhere. If they do move, however, you and the commondreamers will just yell, "SHIPPING JOBS OVERSEAS!" and assume that most folks won't bother to think any deeper on such matters than silly rhetoric to discover the perfectly justifiable reason for moving.
You say you don't trust CATO, Keith, but you apparently are oblivious to the extent to which they write about corporations pursuing government favors. Some of that is natural. If gummit is going to make a treaty that affects my business, I certainly want to make sure I don't get the shaft in the deal. I'd want it to not hinder my business at best, but unguarded self-interest might also temp me to seek one that was more advantageous to me than to my competitors. That's the nature of the beast.
I read the stuff from CATO primarily because they do take on issues of .
I'll follow the discussions on the TPP from afar. Some folks will benefit. Others will get hosed. Just the way it works, unfortunately. Whether or not there's enough in there that is so objectionable that it should be ditched remains to be seen.
I'm Ed Thompson, and I approve this message.