Wealth and Opportunity in America

[ionozacuzo]

Very simple, China's under-valued currency and balance of payments surplus are unsustainable and will eventually move to be eliminated by currency appreciation (the more you export, the more your currency increases in demand, making it worth more, and thus your goods cost more to others; that makes your exports less attractive since foreigners have to convert to yours to buy them). What this means is that instead of our dollars being worth 10 over there now, they'll be closer to parity in the future. That will mean the Chinese will be richer relative to us and real wages increase too. Sweat shops' disadvatages to producers would tend to become unbereable as their relative cost to foreigners increase.

That's how.

e:It's also possible that the state will be nicer to its rural poor and solve that potential trainwreck. Those people are the most likely to be lured into sweatshops, so giving them attention would curb inflow those bad jobs.

[ZAKtheGeek]

Very simple, China's under-valued currency and balance of payments surplus are unsustainable and will eventually move to be eliminated by currency appreciation (the more you export, the more your currency increases in demand, making it worth more, and thus your goods cost more to others; that makes your exports less attractive since foreigners have to convert to yours to buy them). What this means is that instead of our dollars being worth 10 over there now, they'll be closer to parity in the future. That will mean the Chinese will be richer relative to us and real wages increase too. Sweat shops' disadvatages to producers would tend to become unbereable as their relative cost to foreigners increase.

That's how.

If the currency appreciates, you can easily just pay sweatshop workers less. You can still pay them the same relative amount (in dollars, let's say). As for the exports, you can charge foreigners somewhat less for those too. Prices are supposed to go down with deflation, are they not?

Even developed, first-world countries have sweatshops. It's because of their efficiency, and because people want money.

It's also possible that the state will be nicer to its rural poor and solve that potential trainwreck.

Nicer how? It sounds suspiciously like interfering with business affairs, the way I imagine it...

[Jagos]

America may have sweatshops taking advantage of immigrants, but again as America developed into a more intelligent nation they naturally faded away. You won't get rid of ALL of them. They just won't be as prevalent.

[ZAKtheGeek]

No, they faded away because they were made illegal. Because things like minimum wage, child labor laws and allowing of unions all made the very elements that make up sweatshops illegal.

All of these laws are also intefering in business, by the way. Not laissez-faire, hands-off free market. Which brings me back to my point (or some point I made earlier): if there is no government interference, you're going to have sweatshops.

[Jagos]

Paragraph One: WRONG. China already IS a world super-power. They're on the freaking Security Council of the U.N.!

I'm referring to China surpassing the US as the US may have to take a step back from world events. Leaving China as the sole superpower.

All of these laws are also intefering in business, by the way. Not laissez-faire, hands-off free market. Which brings me back to my point (or some point I made earlier): if there is no government interference, you're going to have sweatshops.

I'm of the impression that the US's balance gives the best results. True, there's government interference but the government isn't dictatorial in all forms.

In regards to minimum wage and all, you can't live on the minimum wage... Inflation goes up as people are paid more and the value of the dollar is decreased.

I'm not entirely positive if the government has to change or just the societal view on whether sweatshops are good or bad has to change.

[ZAKtheGeek]

What the US has going may or may not be the best way to do it, but it certainly isn't a totally free market.

So if you consider the US to have a good economic model, then you should think that china needs more than a free market to maximize its accomplishments.

...why were we talking about china again? -_-

[Fifthfiend]

Originally Posted by ionozacuzo

I guess there are two ways of looking at it. My way makes me happy the way things are going. There isn't any strong-handed meddling in people's lives, and the poor seem to be closing the gap with the middle class. That the rich are getting richer doesn't really bother me since it's being done by the 'free and fair market'.

So I was thinking about what I wanted to say about free markets, and it occurred to me that the point we're really missing here is nice as free markets may sound, the thing about them is they're right up there with that other classic economic cornerstone, the free lunch, on the list of things that do not exist.

Every market comprises a complex and layered conglomeration of laws, rules, regulations and codes, by the very nature of their function, to facilitate the interaction of disparate and competing interests. I mean, you know how things work in a 'free' market? You have something I want, so I beat you senseless and take it. Or I just wait until your back is turned, and run off with it. Everything past that, from saying we're not gonna allow that sort of thing to hiring a guy to make sure nobody tries it to figuring out who's supposed to pay that guard we just hired oh and who's gonna make sure he isn't stealing from us, just adds up the layers of rules and regulations from which a market is created. And from there, it just scales on up, into contracting, contract enforcement, rules of incorporation and liability and every other damn thing you can think of. And for goddam good reason too - here, you want a freer market? Okay, stockbrokers are now free share insider information with anybody they like. Hey my buddy works over at Merryl Lynch, me and him'll be laughing our champagne-soaked heads off while you're wondering where your life savings just went.

And as if 'free market' wasn't enough of a contradiction in terms... then you go and throw 'fair' in there? I mean, what the what? I'm sorry, but there's no definition of 'fair' that has anything to do with a system which by its design will produce winners and losers and then allows those winners to accrue advantages such as to weigh all subsequent rounds of competition even more heavily in their favor. I mean Christ, it's like if the NBA decided hell, not only are we gonna start letting the winning team keep its points after every game, we're gonna let them accrue fuckin' interest on them!

So yeah, free and fair markets are a nice idea, it's just here in reality, at best what we have is a system of rules and regulations that isn't weighted too heavily in favor of any one side. And that's at best, because that still doesn't have much of hell-ass nothin' to do with how business actually works. I mean unless you're saying that I suddenly have the same capacity as a billionaire capitalist to

- incorporate my assets overseas, dodging billions of dollars in taxes while still enjoying access to the public infrastructure funded by all the hard-working chumps out there

- essentially be gifted money in the form of federally backed construction contracts which guarantee the venture's profitability construction contracts and open access to public thoroughfares for infrastructure projects on which I still keep all subsequent profits from the venture

- have the government not only extend my copyrights - we're talking about government-granted monopolies on ideas here - effectively out into infinity, but also to assume the duty of enforcing those copyrights for me

then we are not talking about a system that has anything to do with freedom, fairness, or much of anything other than people with wildly disparate concentrations of power and influence using said power and influence to accrue more and more such influence, on and on in a cycle that might not look all that vicious, unless you're one of the 99.9% of the world's population caught under the bottom of it.

I mean free and fair? Hell, show me where in history the federal government has sent in troops to defend union activists' rights, you know, instead of gunning them down as has historically been the preferred option, and we'll talk about fair. I mean here you'd think the organization of labor would be an essential part of any attempt at a 'free and fair' market, so as to equalize the disparities of power to determine outcomes held by the small minority that controls capital, but funny enough the laissez-faire crowd has always been more than happy to bring the hammer of the law down on any effort to organize, all the way from the God-Damn Pullman Railcar Strike to the Taft-Hartley act to Reagan breaking Patco to Bloomberg spouting outright racist trash at the TWU for calling the MTA on its outright bad-faith maneuvering.

Sorry, but across the whole of history, when the owners of capital have talked about 'free trade', what they talked about was their freedom to trade the rest of us into fuckin' indebtured servitude, piece by piece, and anyone says otherwise is a con man or a fuckin' mark.


...


Bit unfair me arguing against the already-banned and all, I suppose, but I thought that needed it to be said.

But hey, that's the 'free marketplace of ideas' in action!

[Good Iono]

Ban or not, this is worth finishing.

MeisterEDIT: Actually, no. Banned means pretty much you don't participate anymore, in your case ever. Suck it up, you knew perfectly well what you were doing and how we would react.

Still, anyone interested in Iono's views can PM me. I have the post saved.

[Dj_StarChild]

I assume that everyone knows this already, but the american education system sucks. You can't get a productive education unless you pay for a private school, and you can't pay for private school unless your parents have the money to put you in one, and you can't go to a university unless you can pay the tuition, and you could go to community college, but the results are not necessarily as 'successful' or lucrative as they might be if you went somewhere like...princeton, or those other ivy league...elitist...concentration camps. Anyhoo, it seems to me that if you don't get up to a certain level of education, you won't learn to question your surroundings, and if you don't question your surroundings, it is unlikely that you will be able to get out of them. Unfortunately, that kind of education requires money, and that kind of money, at that age, comes from parents.

Fuck you, american dream.
result: most american youths will never make it past being willy lowman, trying to break through the glass ceiling.

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by Dj_StarChild

Blah blah blah America sucks.

Dude, America's socioeconomic system is imperfect, but is there any other nation's dream you'd rather buy into? I can't say I'm a huge fan of Europe's massive unemployment lines and inflexible higher education system, in which -- upon reaching college -- you're only taught one specialization, utterly limiting your mobility later in life. Japan's educational system is so highly taxing and incomprehensibly demanding -- it may teach you plenty of useless information, but it doesn't teach 'em how to live. America's oh-so-intolerant, but if you think immigrants have it bad here, try being a Muslim in Europe, or a Christian in southeast asia. The not-so-free market here in America is so rigid and impossible to climb, that Saudi Arabia just looks like an egalitarian paradise by comparison. If the American dream is so godawful, would we be any wiser to invest in the Soviet dream, the Iranian dream, the Pakistani dream, or the Ethiopian dream?

Oy. Criticizing America is cool by me, because my country has plenty of faults and I'm not proud of them. (Our foriegn policy as of late has sucked ass and we're big polluters and here's the biggest problem with Americans -- we're too arrogant to appreciate how truly lucky we are simply to be born here.)

But you sort of step well over the line when you plant a big "Fuck you" next to its name, and all the socioeconomic freedom we take for granted. And this is coming from a guy who, having just recently graduated college, is knee-high in debt and struggling to find the right networking avenues to actually land an entry-level job. By your logic I should be pissed off at my eeevil country's government for keeping me and my middle-class family down in debt up my ass and thrusting me into unemployment with nothing but a Bachelor's degree to scale the vast wilderness. Instead I find myself awfully grateful to live here in the first place, espesically considering the alternatives.

There are people out there who would literally die simply to let their children have the opportunities available to anyone in America.