Caring MORE about Western living standards=/=caring NOTHING about Third World ones. - Edit 2
Before modification by Joel at 18/09/2012 11:53:32 PM
My working theory is it is because Big Business threatened for years that US production and jobs would leave if regulations were not abolished and, when proven wrong, devised "free" trade to make good the threat. Rather than raising Third World living standards to Western levels as promised, "free" trade is only LOWERING Western living standards to Third World levels—which was the idea. The only way to save Western production and living standards OR improve Third World living standards is FAIR trade, not falsely so-called "free" trade. Unless/until all products sold in the West are held to the same standards, regardless of source (i.e. including US GMOs sold in Europe,) Western production and living standards must inevitably continue eroding: It is just economics, but has nothing to do with taxes.
Free trade is doing exactly what it was expected to do: raise Third World wages and income, lower the cost of goods for Western consumers, and put downward pressure on Western manufacturing wages. Complaining about manufacturing job losses in the West is all very well, but do have the honesty to look at the full picture.
And then as for the next bit, I'm not sure how you define "fair trade", but while working conditions in the developing world are indeed awful in many cases (though getting better by leaps and bounds), your demand that all products sold in the West be "held to the same standards, regardless of source" sounds to me like you're more concerned with preserving Western jobs than with economic growth for developing countries. I suppose in a thread about American unemployment that's not so odd, but then you might as well stop pretending you care about the Third World.
I mean, guilty as charged, but charity begins at home. I am not convinced Foxconn employees (or, in the case of local students, forced workers) are "better off than they were four years ago." People with improving lives do not regularly take them, and I doubt parents of kidnapped and enslaved children are any happier without them.
Helping them is not my primary goal, no; I may be altruistic, but am no martyr. However, I see little evidence any Third World people benefit save high ranking government officials and owners of contractors (and people.) Just as American consumers do not benefit from paying $2 less on jeans they can no longer afford at any price, since their former employer sent their well paid job to Indonesia. Once again Big Business owners (NEVER small businesses, which are going under at an alarming rate in the US) benefits at the expense of consumers and labor, and after nearly 20 years those last two groups have yet to see any benefit "trickle down."
It was never about improving Third World living standards are lowering Western product costs; that was just clever marketing by people who invented and subsist on clever marketing. It was always about lowering production costs by extorting the repeal of Western consumer, worker and enviromental standards paid for in blood over a century. If we genuinely want to help the Third World we must make importing its products conditional on them being made under the same standards as products produced in the West. Letting Western (not Third World) multinationals exploit Third World populations as they once did ours helps no one but Western Big Business, at the expense of the Third World as well as Western consumers, workers and small business owners.
Free trade has done exactly what Ross Perot expected: Created a "giant sucking sound" of lost Western jobs with no benefit to anyone save multinational owners.