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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike M2 who wrote (60414)	5/23/1999 1:27:00 PM
From: Don Lloyd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Mike - (There is a global surplus of labor willing to work for willing to work for slave wages without health or environmental concerns...) I respectfully disagree with this. Wages have to be considered relative to local living standards and costs, even after you factor out currency exchange rates. The local alternatives are almost certainly poverty, and often starvation. A global surplus of labor is true more in a unit labor sense, than when measured in capability to add economic value. Except for some of China, I believe that the labor is generally voluntary and a local economic improvement. Without the import of capital investment, the only economically feasible product of the third world poor will continue to be children with dismal futures. (...I don't see how pitting these workers against American workers will help US living standards. Yes some people can make huge profits like basketball stars getting paid more than all the workers in a sneaker factory...) Again, everything's relative. An overpaid professional athlete will derive less individual benefit from his endorsement than each of the workers in the sneaker factory who are working to eat, and hopefully to save. For an American worker to legally (minimum wage) serve the same production function as the third world laborers, he would need to be supplied with a much larger capital equipment assist, and would probably have to replace 100 third world jobs. (... I don't know where the correct balance is but i do know that there is a danger that the quest for maximum profits goes too far. I would agree that some products should be made where there is a comparative advantage...) The problem in the U.S. is primarily the unskilled and uneducated who simply cannot be productive enough to add net value to final consumer products, even with significant capital infusion. Even to the extent that some can perform useful jobs, the resulting earned wages pale in comparison to the costs of adequate living standards. In a single country, living costs cannot and do not vary anywhere near as much as the effective skill levels of the population. In history, this problem has been 'solved' by grossly stratified classes of the population, with separate living standards and costs. This is no longer considered acceptable, and rightly so. The real tragedy is that potential human skill levels are far more rangebound, given adequate upbringing and education, with relatively small tails on each end of the distribution. Any relatively healthy newborn should be potentially capable of both self support and prosperity, and positive contributions to the overall society and economy. The problem is primarily that the human impulse to control others through defective political and economic systems creates negative individual incentives. Regards, Don