 |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
Ned
|
 |
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:25
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Except that the price of the car won't be $19,000. It will continue to be $20,000. |
No, it will be whatever the dealer can get for it. But, given that there is a $1,000 less cost in the car, he has more room to deal and still make a profit. So in actual fact, the delivered price of the car will drift downwards just below the competition. If the competition does not respond, the car maker in question will gradually grab market share.
All-in-all, a good deal for the carmaker who reduced cost. It is also a good deal for the consumer who will have to pass less for his car. It is a good deal for the offshore worker who now has a job.
The person who suffers is the US worker who is displaced and who perhaps cannot find equivalent employment. But surely, he will find something else to do. In the meantime, he drawns unemployment benefits.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Lord Merciless
|
|
Some leftist internationalists don't only want economic globalization, but also political globalization. They think one cannot happen without the other.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Richard Bruns
|
|
NC, USA
Nov 1999
time: 06:25
|
|
Lots of interesting discussion here. Let my add my two cents. These two comments may seem contradictory, and in fact there has been a good deal of arguing over which one is true, but I will attempt to show that they are both true. I firmly believe in each of the following statements:
- Most capitalists, like most humans, are evil.
- Capitalism is a very good thing for all countries.
Let´s consider a concrete example: sweatshops. I fully agree that they are miserable, hellish places, and that the people who run them routinely commit atrocities. I also believe that these sweatshops are a good thing for the people who work in them. This may seem utterly illogical, but it makes perfect sense. The people who work thee are not bond-slaves, they can leave whenever they want to. But they do not leave, because if they left they would starve. The owners of these shops can use this threat of starvation to abuse the workers. Logically, then, these workers would have starved if the sweat shop was not there. This is obvious from the fact that if they had any other alternative, they would not be in the sweat shop.
So a greedy, evil capitalist employing 100 people in a miserable, filthy sweatshop has saved 100 people from starvation. Even if they are treated so badly that they only die a little slower, they are still being saved from death. How many good, altruistic people can honestly say that they have saved 100 people from starvation and death?
Obviously I am not defending the people who run these places. We need to provide better alternatives for the people who have to work in them, and we need to apply consumer pressure to get the owners to change their act. But the fact remains that opening such a factory gives a better life to everyone who works in that factory.
Charity is a very good thing, and we need more of it. But it isn´t enough. People need jobs, and they need ot be productive, or they will never be able to sustain themselves. Capitalists provide those jobs, and globalization and free trade mean more jobs and more opportunities for the undeveloped and developing world.
In short, sweatshops may be a crime, but condemming an entire nation to subsistence farming and reliance on handouts is an even worse crime. Yes, we should put effort into getting people jobs and opportunities that are better than what corporations are giving them. But capitalism, globalizaion, and free trade are excellent tools because they create conditions that allow evil people to create these jobs and opportunities even if they are motivated by nothing more than self-interest.
Many people have portrayed big capitalists as predators. This is not true. They are, in fact, scavengers. They did not create the problems of poverty and corruption that hound the third world. They simply profit from them. And as they profit, they help these countries, by easing unemployment and paying wages to people who would otehrwise have nothing to do.
But how does this benefit us, in rich places like America and Europe? Most leftists firmly believe that we are imperialists, dominating these people for our own gain. It is obvious to them that our country profits by this trade. Right-wing opponents to globalization, on the oterh hand, believe that Americans suffer when jobs move overseas, and this is what I will address.
History and logic both show undeniably that, on average, and over the long term, any increase in productivity and efficiency helps everybody. This is because more output is being produced for less input, so there is more to go around. Even if most of the profits initially go into the pockets of the rich, they will be spread around eventually. Nobody has a money vault like Scrooge McDuck, where they stuff away all their cash and let it sit around. Either they invest it, causing economic growth and more jobs, or they spend it, giving the money to whoever they paid. More output for less input means a higher standard of living, so anything that increases productivity will be good. Capitalists, through their own self-interest, are constantly trying to increase the efficiency of their operations.
Of course, that leaves the question of whether hiring 10 third world workers for a dollar an hour is more efficient than hiring one first world worker for 15 dollars an hour. It would seem to be an enormous waste to have ten people do what one person could do. Is money spent really equivalent to resources consumed?
The short answer is, yes. When hiring a rich world worker, companies are subsidizing a rich world lifestyle. Every resource that the rich worker consumes can be considered an input into the production process. When paying a rich world worker, companies are paying for all of the cars and stereos and computers and entertainment that those workers are consuming. Environmentalists love to point out that the lifestyles of rich world people take up something like 20 times the natural resources of third world people. So if a production process uses 10 third world people instead of one rich world person, the earth suffers half as much, and the same output has been produced using fewer inputs.
Next there is the question of why consumers have not experienced the benefits of this productivity gain. The short answer is, we have. It may be true that the inflation-adjusted proce of a car is not any lower than it was thirty years ago. But as Ralph Nader will gladly tell you, cars today are far superior to cars thirty years ago. Safety features and quality have inproved dramatically, and air pollution per car has been greatly decreased. Consumers may not be paying less, but they are getting much better value for their money. This increase in quality and safety of products have soaked up many of the productivity gains of globalization and new technology, but since such things are hard to quantify they are often overlooked. And nobody can deny that the lifestyle of the average American today is much richer and more ostentatious than the lifestyle of Americans in the past. The money for this increased consumption has all come from productivity gains, and many of these productivity gains are due to moving factories and services overseas.
The only thing that capitalism does not handle properly is externalities. If the company does not have to pay for an inefficiency such as pollution or injuries to workers, then that company´s activities will not tend toward more outputs for less inputs. This is the proper role of government: to make sure that all companies pay for the externalities that they impose on the rest of us. When that happens, such externalities are reduced because they become inputs that the company must pay for.
In short, globalization and free trade must continue but companies must be made to pay for all the damage they do. Note that I said pay for the damage, not prevent it. If a company can generate 200 million of profits by with a process that generates pollution that would cost 100 million to clean up, then they should be allowed to pollute, taxed for the cost, and thus be allowed to keep 100 million in profits, since they have generated 100 million dollars of wealth.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Ned
|
|
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:25
|
|
Richard, Good, logical post. However, before I agree that capitalism is evil, I'd like you to define "evil." In the world of Adam Smith, self interest is "good" and denying one freedom is "evil."
I found your point about the relative productivity of first world vs. third world labor. The difference between them, of course, is machines and tools. Given enough of the latter, the American worker can easily be cost effective.
However, then consider Unions. No only do they seek higher wages and safer working conditions, they seek to slow down the introduction machines and tools that increase productivity - in order to protect jobs. One can easily see that Unions are a major factor in production moving offshore.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
chegitz guevara
|
 |
Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:25
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by Richard Bruns
The people who work thee are not bond-slaves, they can leave whenever they want to. But they do not leave, because if they left they would starve. The owners of these shops can use this threat of starvation to abuse the workers. Logically, then, these workers would have starved if the sweat shop was not there. This is obvious from the fact that if they had any other alternative, they would not be in the sweat shop. |
Individually, yes. As members of a class, no. How does this work? Let's take NAFTA as an example. NAFTA was a deal shoved down our throats by the collective capitalists of North America. It's effects in Mexico were rather nasty, sending lots of people into poverty very quickly. Whereas before they were making a living, now they aren't, and have to take any work they can find. Collective land ownership is put under serious pressure as a reult of NAFTA, and so people are thrown off their land. Where once they could make a life, now they must travel to the maquiladoras and accept work in a hell-hole. In other words, the alternatives were deliberately destroyed by the polical agents of the people now benefitting from sweatshops.
The IMF and World bank have acted similarly around the world, trashing local economies, so that now people who once had the ability to live at an okay standard of living must take work at some "dark, satanic mill." By and large, globalization has been an disaster for the people of the 3rd World. The countries to which everyone points as successes, South Korea, Taiwan, etc., are the countries that in fact have massive government control and regulation and high tarrifs. Once they tried to transition their economies to a more laizze-faire version, they fell like so many houses of cards, although they've recovered somewhat since 1997.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Ned
|
|
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:25
|
|
DuncanK, Now that really is a twist. Most of the time governments pay people not to grow something - like sugar. It is really odd that anyone would promote the growth of a specific commodity knowing that the result will be a collapse in prices of that commodity.
But to some extent you anti-globalists do have a point. I will make it by analogy to Rome. Rome grew to a great size for its time, more than a million people, because it depended on food and supplies of all kinds from the Empire. It imported large quantity of food from Africa, metals from mines in Spain, water from the hills of central Italy, etc. As each piece of the Empire was carved away, Rome lost one of its support pillars. Population and production declined, dramatically as a result of the Gothic Wars. In the end, I understand that only 30,000 people lived in Rome.
The very same thing could happen to the US and to the West. For example, we would be in deep do do we were completely cut off from ME oil.
So as global interdependence grows, the need for stabiity grows. This is why, I believe, that the issues of war and peace in the ME are of such great concern to many.
|
|
| |
|
| |
All times are GMT. The time now is 05:25.
Apolyton Time is 00:25. |
top of page
|
| archivepost |
|
Forum Rules:
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
|
HTML code is ON
vB code is ON
Smilies are ON
[IMG] code is ON
|
|
|
|
|
|
29-01-2003 22:32
:
) made off like bandits.
.
.
|