Comment by scratchyone
16 days ago
No, because it is far more expensive to domestically produce our own products. I would rather not have a huge increase in the cost of living.
16 days ago
No, because it is far more expensive to domestically produce our own products. I would rather not have a huge increase in the cost of living.
I don't want a cost of living increase either. However, this raise the question of what the real cost is. The prices might be cheaper, but is that only because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections? Is it just because I'm greedy and I'm not willing to pay someone a liveable wage here or go without whatever it is? I'm not sure, but it makes for an interesting thought experiment.
Right, and there's a good case to be made for tariffs that are explicitly tied to another country's worker and environmental protections, where the country has actionable steps to improve their worker/environmental protections in order to avoid the tariff.
But the current administration is itself actively opposed to worker or environmental protections, and the result of the current tariffs will just be that the poor people overseas end up even more impoverished and still lacking in protections.
I worry about this, but I started worrying about it less when I read about Purchasing Power Parity. The same stuff costs less in poorer countries.
For some things that's true. For others it is not, or at least not enough to make up for the difference. For example, "housing" might cost less, but the definition of housing might be different. Even if we adjust the standards and built the exact same thing, it would be cheaper, but likely still out of reach for the average person in the poorer market.
> but is that only because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections
That's definitely happening, but there are other possible reasons. For example a good could be more efficiently grown or produced in a country because of geographical reasons.
Also, from a pragmatic standpoint, it is simply not the case that all wages and wealth across the countries of the world are equal. Maybe that could be a goal but is anyone talking about that? Either way, it does not follow that the workers in that country are necessarily exploited when paid lower wages compared to the importing country, unless we are using different definitions.
This is not to mention that untargeted tariffs can increase the cost of living _for no gain at all_. If Germany manufacturers some specialty tool (not with slave labor, I would hope!), and no US manufacturer wants to make it, then I suddenly have to pay X% more for no reason at all.
Sure, not every country needs the same pay. Things like cost of living can vary. It seems hypocritical to say that people in one country deserve better protections than in another though. If we aren't creating the same protections as the workers here, it would seem that we are exploiting the less protected group. Workers here deserve real unions, but not in China. Workers here deserve OSHA, but not in China. We've decided as a society that people deserve certain protections, benefits, and even environmental protections. These costs factor into the cost of the goods. To not extend these protections (or the remuneration to pay for them) to the poorer group is exploitation by definition.
If tariffs were being added as a response to poor working conditions, and a requirement of lifting the tariffs was to improve working conditions, that could potentially be seen as a generally positive outcome for the world.
Producing the same good in the US, at anywhere near the same price, requires automation or prison labor (legal slavery in the US) and likely won't result in more manufacturing jobs and likely won't result in higher wages for workers. Florida's approach here is child labor, which is both exploitative and cheap.
If the good is so cheap that we can't get close to it here, that might actually be a good case for a targeted tariff depending on the circumstances. It's essentially similar to anti-dumping depending on the specifics even if it isn't tied to overseas conditions.
"because we're exploiting poorer people in markets with fewer worker protections and fewer environmental protections"
This can easily be overdone. If you stop doing business with poorer people, you all but guarantee that they stay poor. Counter-productive to say the least.
In my lifetime, I saw a lot of countries grow at least somewhat wealthy from extensive commercial contact with the West, including mine (Czechia).
Yeah, you don't want to stop business, but if the price gap is massive, it might be good to ask why. Sometimes it's because something is more efficient in that country. Others it's just people getting taken advantage of.
Better not pay them anything and they can go work in an even worse sweatshop, right?
Or can hire some child labor in Florida since they already changed the laws there.
Shhhh, you're not supposed to ask those questions!