Why would poverty be a necessary import? We don't need to let US companies pay as poorly as overseas to achieve a competitive price in fact we cannot because
-You cannot get skilled labor to work for less than competing unskilled work
- Welfare and benefits erase the savings.
You just make it prohibitably expensive to deal with your foreign competition, subsidize it, or some combination.
You can’t have industry and no huge salary gap between the bottom and the top. Correlation, if you mandate very uniform wages, you only have tertiary service jobs, like France which has very little income ratio (3.5x, if I remember), but doesn’t have industry anymore.
It was the simple desire of “solving it with taxes” which was the root of a despicable trend that has mechanically “exported” poverty to where it can’t be seen, because we couldn’t sustain the sight, for about 60 years now. It’s a sin and a bane.
Taxes (eg tariffs against countries that produce goods efficiently) only extract private value to put it in public hands, which politicians use to favouritize groups they like (or military projects they like, concerning US). It doesn’t make companies innovate in average - only the side that receives the taxes innovates somewhat, and based on non-market incentives, rather political ones. France is full of those non-performing startups that end up 4th on the market, if that is what you aim for, so France doesn’t have technological sovereignty.
At least if we accepted poverty in the USA in exchange for bringing industry back home, those workers would be poor but work in a safe environment.
> At least if we accepted poverty in the USA in exchange for bringing industry back home, those workers would be poor but work in a safe environment.
Nobody's stopping anyone from opening up a factory that pays people $7/hour in the US.
Since bringing industry back home is so important, are you ready to go work in it for those kinds of wages?
It's easy to demand that other people accept poverty. It's hard to explain why market actors would be willing to work for low wages in a high-COL country.
You have done nothing to validate this claim and are simply regurgitating acceptable political speak.
Kids can be taught otherwise. And a minority of the rich can be told to stfu by the masses, or enjoy working in the coal shovel jobs.
We pretend there’s a meritocracy lifting these folks up, but it’s been argued well it’s nothing more than network effects and really just seeing no upside to being egalitarian while the masses sit around being apathetic political agents.
And believing you’re going to achieve perfect sovereignty is non-sense. It’s a shared planet. Nation state politics worked fine when technology and access to the world were control by monarchs.
Not enough old people are going to be around to confirm their common sense awareness of these heavily distributed “truths”.
The social narrative will be whatever the political engaged make it.
Avoiding political engagement all but insures this.
Yes, and making it too expensive to import, and paying high wages results in high prices of finished products, which reduces purchasing power, and so increases poverty on the margin.
Industrial development can be promoted without creating poverty by using the tax code to eliminate any after-tax speculative super profits in real estate and finance and non-industrial sectors so that investors are forced to put their money into the real economy.
Then by using financial regulations to require loans which expand quantity of legal tender in circulation to be issued on security of the replacement cost of tangible industrial capital, structures, plant, and equipment values rather than on security of the present value of future property rents.
Then by replacing regressive sales, consumption, and payroll tax with a distributive ground rent tax on property owners.
Promoting industrial development through regressive taxes and wage suppression is only the aristocratic form of industrialization pursued by right-wing governments when they are unwilling to eliminate after tax ground rents and non-industrial super profits enjoyed by the rich.
Hi, I have a question if you have time at some point:
When you say “ Then by using financial regulations to require loans which expand quantity of legal tender in circulation to be issued on security of the replacement cost of tangible industrial capital, structures, plant, and equipment values rather than on security of the present value of future property rents.”
This is interesting to imagine, but how? (Sorry if it’s a stupid-obvious question, but I am earnest in asking it. Perhaps I am stupid tonight.)
I could certainly see regulation to kill the “future rents/superprofits industry” but not quite sure how to require loans for ... call it the future-tangible-industry-industry?
Also sorry this question is formulated in such a round about way.
Gleeful aside: Me thinks the status quo elite would not like it. ;)
Finally; I am happy to do research -> how might you suggest I google my way into this viewpoint most directly?
I ask the same question too, because when people speculate on computing:
> security of the present value of future property rents
often
> replacement cost of tangible industrial capital, structures, plant, and equipment values
Are often included included in the models because often this is the collateral that can actually have a liquid market value in the event of liquidation, but this is also subject to market conditions at the time this needs to be liquidated and the cost of actually liquidating.
Not to mention it would lower loan values since other non tangibles are often considered (IP, investor sentiment on corporate managers executing any given strategy, market conditions, etc).
-You cannot get skilled labor to work for less than competing unskilled work
- Welfare and benefits erase the savings.
You just make it prohibitably expensive to deal with your foreign competition, subsidize it, or some combination.