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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (173413)	10/27/2005 4:12:07 PM
From: geode00	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Yes but if our labor laws say that all jobs are open to both women and men then moving a company to Saudi Arabia and not allowing women to drive fork lifts or trucks isn't just a cultural issue, it's an issue of labor law. I'm more interested in looking at the root of 'competitive pressures.' I think it's pretty basic. Do we really need to have 6 pairs of cheap sneaks from China at 30 cents/hour that we then dump into the local landfill every few months? What about producing a higher quality, more expensive single pair of sneaks in the US and then keeping them for a year? Remember when PCs used to last for years? I have two Dells that are falling apart because Dell has apparently discovered that people really need to have a new PC every two years. When did we get to be this wasteful? I just 'retired' a PC that runs Windows 95. It's still running strong but the monitor is finally on the fritz so I finally unplugged it....RIP. When I said 'should' about manufacturing, I didn't mean that there are laws requiring it. I'm talking about the basic idea that most of us have adopted that the American citizen is so sophisticated and advanced that jobs like manufacturing are too lowly for us. I hear over and over again that we're going to shift manufacturig out of the country so that we have a nation of 'knowledge' workers. I say that's baloney. People are pretty much the same the world over and there are plenty of 'knowledge workers' in other countries just as there are plenty of manufacturing workers in the US. Therefore, if we want to achieve and maintain a high standard of living, we have to address the problem of competitiveness differently. Does that mean protectionism against cheap imports from countries with lousy environmental and labor laws? I think the answer is yes. Just as american capitalism doesn't exist without american regulation and laws, american competitiveness doesn't either. If we refuse to buy from the likes of Wal-Mart (80% manufactured in China and subsidized by American taxpayers) and those cheap imports are no longer so cheap....we might return to manufacturing in the US of A again.