Ok. What did I miss? If jobs keep getting sent overseas for cheap labor -- who is going to buy

[BigBearJohn]

all these products made with cheap labor? They are destroying
the middle class, no?

Who the hell is going to buy all this crap being made overseas
if no one has a job or any money to spend?

:shrug:

[DrDan]

1. hence easy-to-get credit cards

[liberal N proud]

2. I have been asking that question for years

Since the first company announced it was closing shop in the US and sent the jobs overseas, I have been asking who will buy all this shit when there is no one left making any money here.

We can't all work service jobs.

[JHB]

5. It's been asked since the Reagan days...

...when all sorts of factories and shops were closed thanks to Mergermania and leveraged buy-outs.

[raccoon]

13. Me too, and I still haven't got an answer. nt

[Selatius]

3. I would predict that the economy collapses once the working class is exhausted.

The money accumulated at the top will remain at the top and simply circulate among friends. You will end up with an economy with an appallingly large under-class and a very small minority of rich people, like Colombia or El Salvador or France before the Revolution.

[JHB]

4. You missed investing your portfolio wisely...

...after all, everyone else did.

At least, everyone worth speaking of.


(That's sarcasm and a bit of a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy allusion. Unmarked sarcasm often fails to translate into prose.)

[Boojatta]

6. My question...

what's the purpose of carefully crafted employment law and environmental law if most products are imported from places that don't bother with such "details"?

Is it better to be unemployed in America than to be employed at a workplace that violates some employment regulations, but that is able to compete with overseas factories?

Is there some barrier that ensures that toxins outside of America won't get into America?

Does libertarian philosophy demand that street drugs be legalized only in America? What about China? Why are American companies forbidden from selling opium in China? That seems to be a violation of the libertarian principle of free trade. In this modern world we need bold new ideas, like the idea of an opium war. What happened to Bush's poodle dog when we need him?

[blindpig]

7. The growing 'middle class' of China and India.

Who cares who buys as long as the profits end up here? Capital has no social responsibility. The workers of America can get jobs in the enforcement branch of Capital, the US military.

[justabob]

9. indeed

The only way any of this makes sense is if the corps no longer need the great consumer class of the US. The locust swarm is heading to Asia and the vast untapped markets of their rising middle classes leaving the rotting carcass of the US behind. They don't need us anymore. In a few years WE will be the ones working in sweat shops for dollars a day, and having all our natural resources stripped to support the Asian markets. I may well be wrong, but so far, that is the only way I can get my head around this 'strategy'.

[unblock]

14. bingo. the design is for america to be the place to be ultra-rich and their support staff

if you're not ultra-rich in america, eventually the only jobs will be the ones that really can't be outsourced.
we'll be left with mansions and corporate headquarters and serfs who work in restaurants and cut hair and so on.


"our" economy will still look great by the numbers, as the rich getting richer will more than cover the poor getting poorer, numerically speaking, anyway.


welcome to the republican utopia.

[maryf]

15. Correction?

Capitalist utopia might be better...

[unblock]

18. only if you buy the republican definition of capitalism

any reasonable definition of capitalism, going back at least to adam smith, requires actual competition, a level playing field, and so on, internalization of externalities, an absence of trusts, monopolies, and monopsonies, and so on.

republicans don't buy into any of those restrictions, but they are part and parcel of capitalism.

[maryf]

17. Yep...

and we're being trained to be the global corporations guard dogs in the schools, and via our video games, movies (so many glorify war, even those with a "good" message) and tv shows. Poverty draft is much more insidious than a government draft, and doesn't seem to be producing the same number of protests...

We need a strike for real Jobs, real help for the people, real healthcare, end to prison slavery, etc.

A strike of by and for the people, and not just the people of this country.

[a la izquierda]

8. American businesses need to take a cue from elsewhere...

one of the fundamental tenets of Peronist populism was to get the factories to pay the laborers a living wage. By doing so, Peron reasoned, it guaranteed a market for the goods produced in factory.

Our government and our corporate masters seem to have forgotten this simple tenet.

[Bitwit1234]

10. And they are complaining about what businesses

that are left here going bankrupt. If the people don't have jobs to make money how can they buy goods. How can they go out to the movies, the eateries. No wonder mall after mall is becoming ghost towns. Pretty soon we will look like the movies of all those cities and malls shuttered and ghostly. Wake up people America is dying right before our eyes. And our politicians are not doing one damn thing about it.


They spend millions and millions of dollars roaming the country campaigning to get into office, promising us they will change things. And as soon as they are sworn they buy a larger pocket and pocket book to start to stash all the corporation money in. While Americans loose home after home go homeless in the streets, their children starve. But that's OK that politician can come out and campaign again they got the corporate money.

[Tailormyst]

11. They aren't thinking long term

They are thinking of how much money (read bonuses) they can make in the 5-10 years they are at a particular company. They don't care about the economy, they care about enriching themselves and their families as much as possible as quickly as possible.

[robcon]

12. They're thinking Comparative Advantage, an economics principle.

It was defined by David Ricardo in 1803, and it shows that free trade benefits all parties to the trade.

See: Paul Krugman...

RICARDO'S DIFFICULT IDEA

The idea of comparative advantage -- with its implication that trade between two nations normally raises the real incomes of both -- is, like evolution via natural selection, a concept that seems simple and compelling to those who understand it. Yet anyone who becomes involved in discussions of international trade beyond the narrow circle of academic economists quickly realizes that it must be, in some sense, a very difficult concept indeed. I am not talking here about the problem of communicating the case for free trade to crudely anti-intellectual opponents, people who simply dislike the idea of ideas. The persistence of that sort of opposition, like the persistence of creationism, is a different sort of question, and requires a different sort of discussion. What I am concerned with here are the views of intellectuals, people who do value ideas, but somehow find this particular idea impossible to grasp.
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm

[Subdivisions]

16. U.S.: 300 million consumers...

China/India: 2 billion potential consumers.

:shrug: