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Author Topic: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM  (Read 70863 times)

GlyphGryph

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #735 on: January 31, 2013, 12:34:07 pm »

Mwahaha! The Republican strategy of making government SO BAD that no one can even THINK of actually socializing rent-seeking infrastructure industries or strategic resources has been completely effective!
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MaximumZero

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #736 on: January 31, 2013, 12:38:22 pm »

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me. Having dealt with government workers in many departments, it really does seem like they utterly and completely loathe the American people with the fury of ten million suns.
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RedKing

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #737 on: January 31, 2013, 12:39:03 pm »

Well, what do you do for work? Because at the rate things are progressing, it's not going to be long before you lack "a job", and can't afford to eat at places like hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Like a steadily rising portion of the US population.

Also, do you have any evidence that we're headed into another recession? I was under the impression that economic activity and profits have been steadily, if slowly, rising?

Bear in mind, he works in China. Good place to weather the recession.

And last month's economic numbers were actually down, first time since 2009. Biggest part of that was....<drum roll please>....due to government cuts pushed by the GOP. Awesome job, guys. Now you get a recession that you can blame on the President, because he actually compromised with you guys and implemented some of what you wanted.  ::)

That said, might be a one-time dip due to those cuts....if we weren't looking at more serious cuts in March when the sequester kicks in. Cue GOP no longer talking about "deficit reduction" or halting government spending, and insert "it's all about jobs! Why doesn't the President care about jobs??!?"

It'd be wonderful satire if it wasn't real.



EDIT:
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me. Having dealt with government workers in many departments, it really does seem like they utterly and completely loathe the American people with the fury of ten million suns.
Yeah, I'm of two minds about the civil service. On the one hand, I still regard civil service as an honorable career choice and one that should be encouraged more often. We *need* our best and brightest to help run the country, and the idea that you're doing it for a higher goal than just making a buck means that I'd be totally okay with the lower overall pay than the same jobs in the private sector.

On the other hand....given the nightmares I've run into in trying to *get* a Federal job, and the Federal employees I deal with on a daily basis....there needs to be a major overhaul. The civil service (especially in Washington, DC itself) is loaded with a lot of older folks who frankly just haven't adapted to the modern workplace and can get away with it because they essentially have tenure. They've been there so long and getting rid of them is so freakin' difficult that they're untouchable. Without that potential threat on their horizon, they don't give two shits about learning how to do their job better. And length of service means pay goes up a LOT. There are a number of grandmothers working as $100,000+ secretaries in DC, and frankly half of them couldn't keep a temp job if they were out in the private sector. Meanwhile, you have a lot of younger people who would LOVE to work for the government and can't get a shot because there's no turnover. Many Federal departments were supposed to be going through a big transition starting as of a few years ago, because so much of their workforce were Baby Boomers set to retire. The recession means that very few of those people are retiring, and continue to clog up space that could be filled more effectively (and cheaper) by new, young employees.

The fact that hiring practices continue to be nepotistic even after OPM had supposedly gone to great lengths to make the process fair....that's just incredibly demoralizing to would-be Federal job-seekers.
« Last Edit: January 31, 2013, 12:53:47 pm by RedKing »
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Trollheiming

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #738 on: January 31, 2013, 12:47:24 pm »

Well, what do you do for work? Because at the rate things are progressing, it's not going to be long before you lack "a job", and can't afford to eat at places like hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Like a steadily rising portion of the US population.

Also, do you have any evidence that we're headed into another recession? I was under the impression that economic activity and profits have been steadily, if slowly, rising?

I'm a technical writer for a construction machinery company, and things aren't that bad yet. And I could always teach English or something. But yeah, I'm saying right now things are good for everyone in the first-world. That's why I can't wrap my head around why everyone thinks this is bad, when it can get so much worse than this. The future is screwed, agreed.

Trollheimig, the believe that if only government stepped out inequality of opportunities would vanish is a myth. The countries with the lowest social mobility among developed country is the US, where the government do much less that in other, more progressive countries. Rich people send their kids to the Ivy leagues, and poors cannot afford college.

By contrast, countries that are so leftist you'd probably have an earth attack the minute you step in (Like Belgium, where they are seriously arguing about nationalizing a steel plant right now.) have much higher social mobility.

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jim Bezos, Larry Elison... I'd wonder how the social mobility is being defined. America is still one of the best places for a true rags-to-riches story.
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Criptfeind

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #739 on: January 31, 2013, 12:58:24 pm »

Come off it, none of those people were crushingly poor (and a few of them started rich). They all lived in different times then it is now. And even then it's not worth it to produce a few lucky individuals if the cost is a system that is so static and unfriendly to the poor.
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GlyphGryph

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #740 on: January 31, 2013, 01:01:16 pm »

Bear in mind, he works in China. Good place to weather the recession.
I was actually under the impression that China was starting to see some problems on this front as well. Lots of jobs shipping to other cheaper countries or being automated away.

I'm a technical writer for a construction machinery company, and things aren't that bad yet. And I could always teach English or something. But yeah, I'm saying right now things are good for everyone in the first-world. That's why I can't wrap my head around why everyone thinks this is bad, when it can get so much worse than this. The future is screwed, agreed.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "everyone". And it would be at least a good number fewer without government assistance. The fact is, the future is here for a lot of people.

And yeah, I wasn't under the impression that any of those people started in rags...
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Sheb

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #741 on: January 31, 2013, 01:07:26 pm »

Yeah, frankly if your definition of a good system is one that produce an handful of billionaires out of upper-middle class, yeah, libertarian utopia is great. A very select few will get the right combination of smarts, luck and hard-work and join the very rich. In the meantime, most richs will have rich kids and most poor will have poor kids.


P.S. Chinese wage are currently raising at 20% per year. They're doing great, shipping the crappy jobs away and starting to have a lot of jobs servicing the Chinese markets.
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Trollheiming

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #742 on: January 31, 2013, 01:56:37 pm »

Come off it, none of those people were crushingly poor (and a few of them started rich). They all lived in different times then it is now. And even then it's not worth it to produce a few lucky individuals if the cost is a system that is so static and unfriendly to the poor.

So, what's crushingly poor in America these days? The funny thing about a graphic that SalmonGod posted recently was that it showed 2.5 billion people lived under $2 a day. But this graphic was created for the consumption of people who have computers and internet. I question how many of those people saw the graphic and sympathized with the rich, to whom they have more likeness, and suspect that most were probably identifying with "fellow" poor people around the world.

Quote
P.S. Chinese wage are currently raising at 20% per year. They're doing great, shipping the crappy jobs away and starting to have a lot of jobs servicing the Chinese markets.


It's a complicated picture. The chinese markets are held up by some pretty dodgy financing, but you'll never see it on the official statistics. But where in the modern world isn't that true? I interface with chinese engineers every day, and there are pay freezes in effect. Most make around $800 a month, but that's quite a bit more than it used to be.

Construction equipment here locally is actually going through a rough patch, but the worst is commodities. Commodities are trashed. I know engineers in coal mines and aluminum factories that have been cut. There's a town called Lvchang in nearby Shanxi where 40% of China's aluminum is made, and it's been reduced to a sleepy backwater lately, according to a guy who works there.

And services can't support an economy based largely on investment rather than consumption. I'm deeply suspicious of any claim that services are picking up the slack.
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Criptfeind

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #743 on: January 31, 2013, 02:09:56 pm »

This is where I would make a witty response, but unfortunately I can't currently think of something completely off topic and irrelevant to the conversation off the top of my head like you can so easily. So I guess you win that little contest of irrelevance.
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RedKing

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #744 on: January 31, 2013, 02:14:40 pm »

Come off it, none of those people were crushingly poor (and a few of them started rich). They all lived in different times then it is now. And even then it's not worth it to produce a few lucky individuals if the cost is a system that is so static and unfriendly to the poor.

So, what's crushingly poor in America these days? The funny thing about a graphic that SalmonGod posted recently was that it showed 2.5 billion people lived under $2 a day. But this graphic was created for the consumption of people who have computers and internet. I question how many of those people saw the graphic and sympathized with the rich, to whom they have more likeness, and suspect that most were probably identifying with "fellow" poor people around the world.

Quote
P.S. Chinese wage are currently raising at 20% per year. They're doing great, shipping the crappy jobs away and starting to have a lot of jobs servicing the Chinese markets.


It's a complicated picture. The chinese markets are held up by some pretty dodgy financing, but you'll never see it on the official statistics. But where in the modern world isn't that true? I interface with chinese engineers every day, and there are pay freezes in effect. Most make around $800 a month, but that's quite a bit more than it used to be.

Construction equipment here locally is actually going through a rough patch, but the worst is commodities. Commodities are trashed. I know engineers in coal mines and aluminum factories that have been cut. There's a town called Lvchang in nearby Shanxi where 40% of China's aluminum is made, and it's been reduced to a sleepy backwater lately, according to a guy who works there.

And services can't support an economy based largely on investment rather than consumption. I'm deeply suspicious of any claim that services are picking up the slack.

I'd say it's patchy at best. Shanghai can support a service economy. Bumfuckzhou, probably not unless there's a robust need for "goat management consulting". But anyways...as much as I love to commiserate about the Middle Kingdom, this is the American politics thread. Poor people here might be objectively well-off compared to some poor bastard in Darfur, but that doesn't really matter if they still can't put food on the table and pay all their bills.

Yes, average incomes are far higher here than most of the world. So are average living expenses.
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GreatJustice

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #745 on: January 31, 2013, 04:47:57 pm »

That will happen either way.  If you remove government controls, it only means the wealthy don't need to worry about usurping the government anymore.  Wealth will still snowball, and other methods of crushing competition become available when the government method is removed.  This is why I'm an anarchist.  We can pendulum back and forth for eternity, and we'll never get a desirable result. 

Given a choice between two directions in the meantime, I'd rather stay on the side that is at least ostensibly supposed to be about serving the people, instead of 100% ruthless winner-take-all-and-losers-can-go-die competition.  That way when it is proven that the system has been sabotaged, there is the slimmest potential for people to organize on the basis of a common idea.  At least when things suck, everyone knows it's because something is broken.  On the other side everything can simultaneously suck but also be working exactly how it's supposed to even in theory, which thins the sociological glue of common understanding necessary for change.

Yet without the many government imposed barriers to entry, entrenched wealth would only last so long as it's possessor was capable with it (Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations and so on). It's pretty damn easy to hold onto your wealth when your stock investments are basically guaranteed to go up by the Central Bank, your companies shielded from competition by high entry costs, and your bank grows by default because it's the first to receive cash from the Central Bank (meaning it gets the benefit of however many billion dollars, and the inflation doesn't kick in until some other chump receives it). Plus, if despite all this things go sour, you have nothing to fear because the government will pay you back for your losses should you be in danger of, god forbid, failing! Hell, if you're a bank in a "progressive" country, the government will promptly drop everything else and fleece it's unfortunate population for tax revenue on your behalf! Furthermore, when the economy is on the brink and things are looking bad, the fellows within the government will prioritize what will get them reelected above what might help; hence, you end up with passionate arguments about cutting a few million or hundred million from a budget of trillions, or else argue about things like the income tax on the richest 1% (which won't affect the absolute richest and most powerful anyway because THEY make money through investments and effective tax shelters like Berkshire Hathaway).

Yeah... just like you said, the system has been sabotaged.  All you've done here is point out specific indicators that the government has been usurped, and turned against its intended purpose.  And those who have the resources to spare will always dedicate some to the making sure things are that way.  It's a dumb set-up that is doomed to fail repeatedly, but at least it provides people some channel for collective struggle.  That's really the only difference.  On the one hand, you have some means for people to pool their resources and have a chance of sticking up for themselves.  On the other hand, you have get rich or be subjugated by the rich and that's it.

As for your claim about the longevity of entrenched wealth, I don't see it.  Those who own the world's resources impose conditions for the rest of the world to partake of those resources, and they structure those conditions to be in their favor.  That's how wealth entrenches itself.  Whether they do that through influencing the government or through ruthless business tactics doesn't really matter.  Actually, it does matter, because the average person has some theoretical voice in one, but not the other.  Competition can challenge entrenched wealth, but so can a determined political movement.

If market competition were really so good at weeding out corruption while rewarding hard work and innovation, then Nikola Tesla wouldn't have perished destitute and forgotten, and elementary schools wouldn't teach children that Thomas Edison was the greatest inventor in American history.

Yet Edison made a disproportionate amount of his money through patents and IP, two things that are effectively artificial barriers instituted by the government. The end of the Gilded Age was a period in which every businessman tried to pillage every other by supporting government initiatives in their favour (be in strict regulations in quality/price/etc from large corporations or anti-trust from small companies) until power was far more concentrated in the hands of the government itself, government backed monopolies, and large corporations in heavily regulated industries.

Going by a free market, individuals accumulate wealth through producing things for their fellow man and trading them voluntarily for the benefit of both. I hire Jim to make shoes for me, I buy the machinery, etc for Jim to make shoes, I sell Frank the shoes in exchange for something I want, and then I compensate Jim for his energy and time in a second, mutually beneficial exchange. If, at any point during this (very simple) series of exchanges someone is dissatisfied, they can reject it and go do something else instead. Everyone is better off, as they acquired something they wanted for something they had but didn't want as much (be it time/energy, shoes, or money). Over a long period of time, I might even accumulate a pile of wealth, perhaps even enough to help my children go through life without needing to work. And that's just fine. However, any term longer than a generation or so, that wealth will dissipate unless those who receive it are careful with it. Notice how people who win hundreds of millions in the lottery don't become influential, powerful oligarchs despite having so much. And that's just fine too.

But see, the government doesn't need the voluntary consent of every individual involved. If I can make the government happy, I really don't need to serve anyone else well because I can use my connections to get the competition strangled by regulations and barriers that mean I can sit on my ass producing an expensive product without having to actually keep consumers happy. Now my wealth is firmly entrenched, as I can squash anyone who comes close to causing me to lose any of it.

Now, with Syndicalist Anarchism (which is what you advocate, I believe), you run into a variety of unintended problems. Okay, so you've succeeded, the government is gone, the workers own the means of production, and there are no rich people. First of all, you have the awkward problem that creation of capital goods requires capital accumulation, which basically requires wealth accumulation. But there is no property, only "possessions", so no one person is actually capable of bringing these into existence! That's why Syndicalism starts with "The workers seize the means of production" in the first place. There's no organization like a government that will create them either like in a regular Communist nation, and the largest organization at all, depending on which Anarchist you ask, is either a commune or the factory itself. So creating something new requires that you manage to somehow convince one of these organizations to take a big risk for effectively no payoff. It also requires enforcers to crack down on people who would inevitably start bringing back capital accumulation, like people voluntarily working for others in exchange for passing off the risk ("I'll run this factory for you guys and take on all risks if it fails, so you get a guaranteed steady wage while my own will be determined by the success of the factory"). The practicality in the long run is lacking, if the experiences in Catalonia are anything to go by.

You say that liberals have no solutions and conservatives do.

Individual liberty is served by social and economic justice. Libertarians claim to promote liberty, but when their policies inevitably lead to a system that disenfranchises the majority of people and makes the ability to express rights so grievously unequal, then they are not truly promoting liberty.

Sorry, but right now the conservative solution is destroy America and return to more conservative times when the plutocrats had absolute liberty to rape, pillage, maim and kill in the name of their god, money or just for kicks and everyone owed fealty to them for the privileged of bondage.

Well, no. Liberals (in the American sense of the term) create the illusion of safety and security for the poor while simultaneously happily backing the interests of the wealthy and influential indirectly. In Europe even moreso, a state of dependency is created in which many people effectively require the welfare state to continue to live their lifestyles, which in turn motivates them to support it, which leads to more people becoming dependent on the government, and so on and so forth. Over time, this comes to include important sectors of the economy. Yet when push comes to shove, they quite happily throw those dependent on the government to the wayside and bleed them for cash to pay back their friends in the banking industry at the expense of nearly everything else. Hell, in Greece, a country that used to have one of the highest ranked healthcare systems in the world, basic drugs like Aspirin are hard to find. The people think the government really cares about them under this system, yet the government is as much in the pocket of the powerful as ever, it just creates the pretense of equality and caring.

Conservatives (again, in the American sense) have the problem of being notoriously mushy on what they want. "Let's cut taxes!" they say first, without even opposing the spending that requires those taxes in the first place. Then, they get a bit more principled and say "Let's cut spending!". But what spending? Certainly not Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or the Military, which combined are something like 80% of US government spending! So instead they cut from insignificant programs and make a big deal about it, while the liberals similarly make a big deal out of it lest people figure out the game they're playing. The most honest of conservatives at least understand the problem and part of the solution, but they point at a mythical picture of the past as the "ideal", as though there was ever a period in American history that was great. Radical change on present systems is required to achieve the ideal that the most honest of conservatives and libertarians want, not simply "rolling back" to the 1950s, 1900s, 1770s, or what have you.
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The person supporting regenerating health, when asked why you can see when shot in the eye justified it as 'you put on an eyepatch'. When asked what happens when you are then shot in the other eye, he said that you put an eyepatch on that eye. When asked how you'd be able to see, he said that your first eye would have healed by then.

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RedKing

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #746 on: January 31, 2013, 05:10:24 pm »

Going by a free market, individuals accumulate wealth through producing things for their fellow man and trading them voluntarily for the benefit of both. I hire Jim to make shoes for me, I buy the machinery, etc for Jim to make shoes, I sell Frank the shoes in exchange for something I want, and then I compensate Jim for his energy and time in a second, mutually beneficial exchange. If, at any point during this (very simple) series of exchanges someone is dissatisfied, they can reject it and go do something else instead. Everyone is better off, as they acquired something they wanted for something they had but didn't want as much (be it time/energy, shoes, or money).

The problem with this (as with most libertarian economic theory) is that it works great in the abstract. Gets dicier when you introduce finite limits and real-world behavior. If you're the only shoe factory in town, Jim's kind of fucked when it comes to getting better pay. If Jim wants to eat (and wants his family to eat), he can't simply quit his job and do something else if the pay is substandard. And if Jim leaves, you can always hire Carl, Bob, Edgar, Alonzo, or any of the other schmucks who need a job. So there's little incentive for you to increase his pay or provide better working conditions. Indeed, it's in your economic self-interest NOT to, because that's a labor cost and your goal is to maximize profits. If you're the CEO of a corporation, it can be argued that it is your JOB to pay as little as you can get away with because that maximizes profit and therefore shareholder value.

And nowadays, you'd be liable to just say "Jim costs too damn much. I'm can hire ten guys named Trang for the same price. Then I don't even have to provide OSHA-compliant working conditions."

And the libertarian standard answer to this is "We must lower our wages and get rid of OSHA, in order to compete fairly!" That's not progress.
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GlyphGryph

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #747 on: January 31, 2013, 05:27:47 pm »

Trang is too expensive anyway. We'll just get a robot to do it.
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penguinofhonor

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #748 on: January 31, 2013, 05:29:09 pm »

I don't think companies using government to keep competition down is evidence of a flaw in government - companies will use whatever power is at their disposal to do that.
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GreatJustice

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Re: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM
« Reply #749 on: January 31, 2013, 07:03:38 pm »

Going by a free market, individuals accumulate wealth through producing things for their fellow man and trading them voluntarily for the benefit of both. I hire Jim to make shoes for me, I buy the machinery, etc for Jim to make shoes, I sell Frank the shoes in exchange for something I want, and then I compensate Jim for his energy and time in a second, mutually beneficial exchange. If, at any point during this (very simple) series of exchanges someone is dissatisfied, they can reject it and go do something else instead. Everyone is better off, as they acquired something they wanted for something they had but didn't want as much (be it time/energy, shoes, or money).

The problem with this (as with most libertarian economic theory) is that it works great in the abstract. Gets dicier when you introduce finite limits and real-world behavior. If you're the only shoe factory in town, Jim's kind of fucked when it comes to getting better pay. If Jim wants to eat (and wants his family to eat), he can't simply quit his job and do something else if the pay is substandard. And if Jim leaves, you can always hire Carl, Bob, Edgar, Alonzo, or any of the other schmucks who need a job. So there's little incentive for you to increase his pay or provide better working conditions. Indeed, it's in your economic self-interest NOT to, because that's a labor cost and your goal is to maximize profits. If you're the CEO of a corporation, it can be argued that it is your JOB to pay as little as you can get away with because that maximizes profit and therefore shareholder value.

And nowadays, you'd be liable to just say "Jim costs too damn much. I'm can hire ten guys named Trang for the same price. Then I don't even have to provide OSHA-compliant working conditions."

And the libertarian standard answer to this is "We must lower our wages and get rid of OSHA, in order to compete fairly!" That's not progress.

Yet the problem with "liberal" economic theory is that it assumes that there are multiple Jims and only one Bob (the name now used for the business owner) and the Jims have no leverage. In a dynamic market, the Jims of the world are effectively the sellers of their labour, skills, time, etc while the Bobs are competing to hire them. Naturally, each Bob would love to have a bunch of super-elite Jims working for pennies at his factory, but then each Jim would like to have a Bob paying him hundreds of dollars an hour to sit and eat doughnuts. The supply of Jims in proportion to Bobs, alongside various other factors (the need the Bobs have of Jims, etc), is what leads to their wages. Now there are two situations in which the Bobs of the world have disproportionate control over the Jims; the first is when there is massive excess labour at the expense of capital, and the second is when barriers to entry in the market make entrepreneurship/hiring trickier. The prime example of the first would be, funny enough, the Gilded age. Being a period of massive immigration from impoverished nations, there was far more labour than capital in the US. Thus, businessmen were able to hire workers for pennies to work in their factories. This trend was basically temporary and was reversing as overall wealth increased in proportion to the labour force, allowing more entrepreneurial projects to occur and increasing demand for labour.

The other would be, well, today. Becoming an entrepreneur is significantly trickier in the modern regulatory environment, never mind all of the laws relating to hiring employees. There are a bunch of disadvantages to hiring people now compared to then, and firing poor workers is far more of a hassle. Thus, smaller businesses tend to hire less because it's saves a lot of hassle compared to just hiring a handful of guaranteed good workers for a bit more. This causes a squeeze on labour, since not only is entrepreneurship limited, hiring by already existing companies is limited too. Oh, and don't get me started on the nonsense with modern "labour relations" where 51% of the workers can vote themselves into a union and effectively shaft their coworkers by cutting their hours without input from either the remaining workers or the employers (which works out great for the workers who don't get shafted, but not so good for those who do or the unemployed looking for a job).

Now besides all that, hiring Trangs in China/Kenya/Brazil is only profitable if they're literally willing to work for next to nothing, AND the conditions in the US aren't favourable. Even assuming they're working for next to nothing, I'd still rather hire skilled labour closer to home so long as the barriers to hire them aren't high, since it gives me a lot more flexibility. The US workers don't NEED to work for pennies to be competitive at all! If hiring an American worker didn't have any bells and strings attached, then it would be a no brainer as to whether to hire them over foreign labour or not (at least in the short term).

I don't think companies using government to keep competition down is evidence of a flaw in government - companies will use whatever power is at their disposal to do that.

Sure, but then the government is actually capable of physically preventing you from competing by sending goons to your home and threatening to toss you in a cage, rob you, or murder you if you resist. Companies generally don't have that capability.
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The person supporting regenerating health, when asked why you can see when shot in the eye justified it as 'you put on an eyepatch'. When asked what happens when you are then shot in the other eye, he said that you put an eyepatch on that eye. When asked how you'd be able to see, he said that your first eye would have healed by then.

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