Again, missing the point entirely while focusing on the analogy instead. You really need to open your eyes and see the big picture here. It's far more complicated than you perceive it to be. I mean, if we don't fix this, Aliens will NEVER take us over. They leave crop circles letting other Aliens know they were here, came, seen and said "nothing worth dominating" and left. This is all common knowledge. The sooner people like yourself understand that outsourcing is ruining the country and MINIMIZING financial opportunities, the sooner we'll have a nation and world worth taking.
Low economy means you have to buy cheap and unfortunately, a lot of those cheaper goods are imported from outsourced jobs. Shit, take customer service being outsourced ... how fucking stupid is that? You mean to tell me American's can't read a damn script? Wrong, they can, the problem ... you'll be fucking baffled at this fact ... is the MINIMUM WAGE! We fucking strangle ourselves with this bullshit about being "fair". Do you get the point yet? Do you see the vicious cycle? Here's another little HINT ... if employers have to ... HAVE TO pay menial tasks at a minimum wage, they will seek overseas employee's where they can pay them $4/hour in less than desirable working conditions.
It's bullshit. If someone wants to work in an unsafe\unpleasant environment, LET THEM, it is THEIR CHOICE!
This kinda shit is making American's WEAK! Oh but the Government thinks they are HELPING us ... bull-honkey-shit. The Government just wants to keep the world less than desirable so the Aliens won't take our resources. That's probably why they keep using Oil for combustion engines when we have more than enough technology to run/operate the same modes of transportation via solar power or electrical power. Nah, can't do that, lets try to eliminate all of the Earth's resources so the Aliens won't eat our brains!
Originally Posted by: Zero2Cool
Er, now I am confused.
1. I can't tell you how unusual it is for me to be accused of over-simplifying. Usually I'm accused of making things too complicated and ignoring "simple" truths. [grin1]
And with all due respect, I expect I have looked at this question in more depth and in more breadth, in more complicated ways in other words, than just about anyone at PackersHome.
2. Are you for or against a minimum wage?
3. If employers "have" to pay a wage of X because of a USA law, then they have three choices:
1. Hire the USA worker and pay the wage of X.
2. Hire the non-USA worker and pay a wage of Y < X.
3. Not hire anyone.
Most arguments against wage-based outsourcing (though perhaps not yours) treat it as a choice between 1 and 2.
In reality, given the fact that substitutes/alternatives can be found for almost anything in our world economy, most outsourcing choices are in fact choices between 2 and 3.
4. The same is true of outsourcing to get around the costs of environmental laws, union power, etc etc.
5. Re: "choice to work in unsafe environment". Again, the choice is more often than not, choose to work in unsafe environment #1 or really unsafe environment #2, not between "unsafe work environment" and "safe work environment".
No system has yet been found to make all workplaces safe (IMO it never will, but I tend to be a believer in the unperfectibility of all things human).
6. The fact of the matter is that virtually all systematic increases of workplace safety over the last 300 years have come where people have traded voluntarily.
Blake wrote of "dark satanic mills" during the Industrial Revolution, but while "Jerusalem" is great poetry (check out the ELP "cover", IMO, for proof), it is lousy economic history. Those mills were awful places to work by today's standards, but from the view of those leaving rural areas to work in them by the hundreds of thousands and then millions, they were a substantial improvement.
7. I hate the word "fair", actually. To me using it is a symptom of imprecise economic thinking. "Fair" usually is equated to "something better than you're proposing", but it's never quite specified what is better (after considering those "complications"), much less how one might accomplish it.
8. I'm not sure I've ever argued here for government making things better. Usually it's the opposite. Government to me is not a solution. It's at best a necessary evil.
9. Let the price of oil move freely upward and I guarantee you'll see more and accelerating use of alternatives to it for energy and other uses.
9A. Take solar power, for example. What is the biggest reason solar power isn't "economical" today? Answer: the atmosphere. Sunlight provides energy enough to power any forseeable human needs for thousands of years. But most of it's benefit (as energy) doesn't get here because of the atmosphere in the way.
So what solar power technology have we focused most of our attention on? That which gathers that tiny fraction that makes it through the atmosphere. Where is the really cheap solar power (in cents per kilowatt total cost)? That which doesn't.
So why, other than the Space Studies Institute and a few other "space nuts", ever seriously explored the benefits of gathering solar power above the atmosphere? Three reasons.
First, and most importantly, because the price of fossil-fuel based power has to this point always been, and continues to be, well below the price of any solar power. As long as fossil fuels are cheaper to their users than the alternatives, those users will choose fossil fuels. Want me to adopt that "technology already available" -- then either make it cheaper or wait until my fossil fuel prices go high enough.
Second, and next most importantly, because we have systematically resisted/complained any upward movement in oil prices, and our political representatives, being the well-paid whores that they are, have systematically assisted in keeping gas prices in particular down to "fair" levels. (Obama's manipulation of the strategic oil reserve is just the latest example. Every president since Nixon has striven to avoid "high gas prices" for the same reason they have avoided admitting the actuarial bankruptcy of social security/medicare -- they know that it's a guaranteed road for us johns to hire a different whore.)
Third, our efforts to encourage development of alternative sources via federal/state funding have consistently pushed the money toward the alternatives with the least long run potential. For example, every day when I park my car at work, I see this snazzy solar power panel which is part of our college's move to have a zero carbon footprint by, I think, 2030. (There's also the wind penis/turbine, but since I'm trying to focus on solar power, I'll leave that one aside for now.) The yammerers here laud how "sustainable" said panel was to put in -- but of course they only counted *our* costs, not the costs of those private/public donees' giving the grant money to us rather than someone else.
Add that opportunity cost in, and the true cost of the alternative energy was almost certainly greater than the cost of what we were doing before.
And even if the investment makes sense here, it's extremely unlikely that it is the kind of solar power that can be used to economically provide power to cities of 100,000 or 1 million or 10 million (as opposed to our little "city" of 10,000), which is where most power is and will continue to be used in the decades ahead.
And it won't be economical because, contrary to the Bernankidiots and Obamaoids of the world, you simply can't subsidize that much energy production at the rate that ground-based solar power requires. If solar power is
ever going to be able to economically provide any substantial fraction of the power needs of a world of 6 billion people and a world economy in the hundreds of trillions of dollars, it has to make an end-run around the atmosphere cost problem. And that means figuring out a way to gather that energy outside the atmosphere cheaply enough.
As a means of R&D, sure it can be valuable to have people experimenting the way we are here. As a scalable long-run technology, not a chance in hell. It's about as practical as Mao's "Great Leap Forward" iron-making-in-every-backyard nonsense was. Which is to say, not at all.
And that means solving the "gravity well" problem. We actually have the technology, and have for decades, for gathering solar power above the atmosphere. The problem is all the physical pieces of that technology currently have to be made from earth-based resources -- and so there's the horribly expensive cost of lifting either resources or technological gizmos up there is and will be as prohibitive.
And the only ways of reducing that cost are (a) whiz bang antigravity is still theory for sci fi stories, or (b) lunar or asteroidal mining (close to possible, but only with start up investment totalling trillions)
So, right now, in the short run, our choices are:
1. Cheap fossil fuels.
2. Really expensive under-atmosphere solar power.
3. Even more really expensive above atmosphere solar power.
4. Major R&D on reducing the start up costs for #3.
#2 and #3 are simply not feasible for the long run. Anyone who believes fossil fuels are finite and that we need to find an alternative should stop complaining about high gas prices and start celebrating them as the only way real incentives for developing ways of doing #4.
And the same goes for any alternative energy you think is better than fossil fuels.
Which brings me to:
10. Aliens. I've read and enjoyed science fiction for decades, including the alien invasion stories. But as an economic historian sort of guy, I find it harder to believe in interstellar aliens being organized on a "rapacious empire" model than to believe in the possibility of FTL travel. The evidence is really, really clear. Empire is a bad economic idea. I do not know of one historical case where empire has been profitable from the perspective of an empire as a whole. Yes, certain individual imperialists might get stinking bloody horribly rich -- the East India companies and their owners come to mind; but for the empire as a whole? No. Cases in point: Mongols, Mughals, Safavids, Ottomans, China, South East Asia, Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, Aztec, Inca, Maya, Egypt, etc etc etc. Cases against: none that I know of.
Any alien that has figured out how to solve the distance problem is going to understand that fact that empire won't pay.
Oh, yes, and if the oligarchs of the Alien East Terra Company are going to be drawn by resources, it isn't our natural resources, much less our fossil fuels. There are planets all over the galaxy with resources. And rapacious space pirates aren't going to have internal combustion engines in their spaceships. The resources they're going to be appropriating is our human capital.
Aliens might turn out to be slavers. But they aren't going to be either sustainability nuts or Republicans.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)