> I don't see any particular reason why workers in the US are more entitled to good jobs than workers in other countries.
There are things you can only do in the presence of inequality because inequality is necessary for specialization. If we require everyone in the world to have the same education then it averages out to something less than a high school education, which means we have no scientists or engineers or doctors.
Once you allow specialization it becomes advantageous to have geographic concentrations. This happens naturally -- Silicon Valley (computers), Detroit (cars), New York (finance), etc.
Exporting jobs increases inefficiency. People working on the same projects have to contend with timezone differences, people waste more time traveling, it's harder for the engineers to talk to the factory workers, etc.
The thing that makes more sense is to give US citizenship to promising engineers in other countries and let them move here, and let other countries specialize in other things (like agriculture or mining).
If exporting jobs is inefficient, let people try to do it and fail - of course they will get outcompeted by the people who aren't exporting jobs, right?
Your comment gives an extremely weak argument in favor of regulation - paraphrased, it seems like you're saying "companies are stupid and don't know how to make money, so we should regulate them to force them to be more profitable". It's hard to say that sentence with a straight face :-)
Businesses, in particular corporations, only operate in the context of some government.
Plenty of folks who think competition is the best and that competition brings out the best in everything still believe that you still have to first organize markets and make sure they are competitive, i.e. It is not the natural state of things in each and every realm of life. We do not force companies to be profitable, we force them to play by a set of rules that we agree allows society to extract the most value from the companies rather than the other way around.
> If exporting jobs is inefficient, let people try to do it and fail - of course they will get outcompeted by the people who aren't exporting jobs, right?
Not if China manipulates currency to overcome the effect.
Fine - let them give the US cheap shit. They're subsidizing American consumers. By the way, the sentence you quoted was rhetorical - I don't actually believe that doing all manufacturing in America is actually productive, profitable, useful or desirable.
Go back and read the first post. Think about what happens if all the manufacturing happens in China.
If they get to the point where they can start designing things there then they have the advantage.
What America should be doing is highly promoting domestic automated manufacturing. Even if it created exactly zero manufacturing jobs, having the factory here would provide a local advantage. Local mills would have a cost advantage because the materials wouldn't have to be shipped halfway across the world and back. Product designers could actually see how their products are being made and improve the process without international air travel, etc.
...let other countries specialize in other things (like agriculture or mining).
What if USA has more comparative advantage in agriculture and mineral resource extraction than in the industries you favor? Everywhere I go in Asia, restaurants brag about beef from USA, and many commodities are exported. Saudi is more concerned about frackers on the Great Plains than about the state oil ministries of Russia or Venezuela, which is why they crashed the petro market last year rather than e.g. five years ago.
There are things you can only do in the presence of inequality because inequality is necessary for specialization. If we require everyone in the world to have the same education then it averages out to something less than a high school education, which means we have no scientists or engineers or doctors.
Once you allow specialization it becomes advantageous to have geographic concentrations. This happens naturally -- Silicon Valley (computers), Detroit (cars), New York (finance), etc.
Exporting jobs increases inefficiency. People working on the same projects have to contend with timezone differences, people waste more time traveling, it's harder for the engineers to talk to the factory workers, etc.
The thing that makes more sense is to give US citizenship to promising engineers in other countries and let them move here, and let other countries specialize in other things (like agriculture or mining).