laissez-faire capitalism does not account for government subsidized goods and slave labor.....nor does it account for environmentalism.....e.g., if I can make more money if I dump toxic waste into the reservoir, then I dump toxic waste into the reservoir.
Zlaxer wrote: laissez-faire capitalism does not account for government subsidized goods and slave labor.....nor does it account for environmentalism.....e.g., if I can make more money if I dump toxic waste into the reservoir, then I dump toxic waste into the reservoir.
What say you?
Interventionist capitalism is the very thing which incites those things, those are all the result of entrenched interests seizing control by leveraging the government to intervene on their behalf at the expense of everyone else, like the steel industry is doing right now.
Government is useful for protecting the commons and mitigating unintended consequences of production inflicted on third parties (paper factories creating bad smells, auto repair shops making too much noise, etc).
They’re not good at legislating the economy into producing positive results.
Fife wrote:I say I have no idea what you are saying.
Is your question about environmental protection? If so, do you suppose that the EPA is the only solution?
No.
A major premise of free trade is that each nation will do what it has a competitive advantage in.....
Countries like the PRC have a competitive advantage in manufacturing across the board because they don't care how much the lives of their workers suck nor about the environment.....so, in order to compete, the US has to either become more efficient or lower labor and environmental level....We're at the point of only achieving efficiency via automation....so we either automate or lower labor and environmental regs....I want to remove that decision by not playing with the PRC at all.....
DBTrek wrote:Government is useful for protecting the commons and mitigating unintended consequences of production inflicted on third parties (paper factories creating bad smells, auto repair shops making too much noise, etc).
They’re not good at legislating the economy into producing positive results.
Indeed, and adopting the bad practices of interventionist countries like China, with all the unintended consequences due to perverse incentives therein, in the name of winning a trade war with China, would seem to be a Pyrrhic victory in the end, burn the village to save the village.
Zlaxer wrote:I want to remove that decision by not playing with the PRC at all.....
But that wouldn't prevent offshoring nor allow America to non compete, there's a whole world out there, China is not the only country America is competing with, and the collective competition, all combined, is much, much bigger than China.
Frankly, the way Trump is setting this up, the best option for offshoring to avoid the hit, is for steel consumers to shift more work to Canada and Mexico, where they can have their cake and eat it too, tariff free access to the American market while still being able to access cheaper foreign steel in the Canadian and Mexican markets.
Smitty-48 wrote:Frankly, the way Trump is setting this up, the best option for offshoring to avoid the hit, is for steel consumers to shift more work to Canada and Mexico, where they can have their cake and eat it too, tariff free access to the American market while still being able to access cheaper foreign steel in the Canadian and Mexican markets.
Protectionist dumdums fail, somehow, to realize that their tariffs are what cause the offshoring of our manufacturing jobs.
