I don't have anything against Amazon or any other company practicing union avoidance, as long as they do it within the law. If they violate the law, they should be punished for it, and I'm glad that we have an Administration now that believes that, too.
From what I've been reading about the "hollowing out of America", I wonder whether Wal…
I don't have anything against Amazon or any other company practicing union avoidance, as long as they do it within the law. If they violate the law, they should be punished for it, and I'm glad that we have an Administration now that believes that, too.
From what I've been reading about the "hollowing out of America", I wonder whether Walmart is really a source of the injury in many of those areas or a band-aid, if an ineffective one, over it. Putting the only retailer with enough reach and depth to bring people in blighted regions the goods they want at prices that they can afford can't be the right answer.
"So phones should either be $7500 or Apple should figure out a way to cut costs without involving small Chinese children." I love that! It's the industrial side of something that I've mostly talked about, here and in Slow Boring, in the agricultural area: how we distort our economy and cause ourselves trouble by keeping prices unreasonably low on products that we can't produce economically or ethically anyway, whether it's lettuce and strawberries in the desert, or iPhones made with child labor. How does it make sense for us to create an ongoing environmental disaster by diverting the whole Colorado River to produce crops in a place where no crops should grow, and then import people and pay them starvation wages to pick the crops, when the people could stay home and we could buy the products from their countries with a lower cost of living where they can be produced at a living wage? Why do we tolerate consumer electronics made with child labor in Asia, when we could demand that they be made by adults in Asia, or better yet in Mexico, where supply chains are so much shorter and safer? Yes, prices will be higher, because they'll reflect a truer cost of production -- but not as high as $7500, probably. And the higher costs will be partially offset by not having to pay subsidies to farmers for growing things on a cost-plus basis, or the cut that all the middlemen take in getting goods to the US from Asia. These are international and interstate commerce areas in which Congress has full authority to act.
Congress is about to take up the Farm Bill, and that would be a very good place to start answering those questions. Except as we already know, the answer will be the same old-same old. *sigh*
I don't have anything against Amazon or any other company practicing union avoidance, as long as they do it within the law. If they violate the law, they should be punished for it, and I'm glad that we have an Administration now that believes that, too.
From what I've been reading about the "hollowing out of America", I wonder whether Walmart is really a source of the injury in many of those areas or a band-aid, if an ineffective one, over it. Putting the only retailer with enough reach and depth to bring people in blighted regions the goods they want at prices that they can afford can't be the right answer.
"So phones should either be $7500 or Apple should figure out a way to cut costs without involving small Chinese children." I love that! It's the industrial side of something that I've mostly talked about, here and in Slow Boring, in the agricultural area: how we distort our economy and cause ourselves trouble by keeping prices unreasonably low on products that we can't produce economically or ethically anyway, whether it's lettuce and strawberries in the desert, or iPhones made with child labor. How does it make sense for us to create an ongoing environmental disaster by diverting the whole Colorado River to produce crops in a place where no crops should grow, and then import people and pay them starvation wages to pick the crops, when the people could stay home and we could buy the products from their countries with a lower cost of living where they can be produced at a living wage? Why do we tolerate consumer electronics made with child labor in Asia, when we could demand that they be made by adults in Asia, or better yet in Mexico, where supply chains are so much shorter and safer? Yes, prices will be higher, because they'll reflect a truer cost of production -- but not as high as $7500, probably. And the higher costs will be partially offset by not having to pay subsidies to farmers for growing things on a cost-plus basis, or the cut that all the middlemen take in getting goods to the US from Asia. These are international and interstate commerce areas in which Congress has full authority to act.
Congress is about to take up the Farm Bill, and that would be a very good place to start answering those questions. Except as we already know, the answer will be the same old-same old. *sigh*
I was going to like this but the “like” button disappeared. We used it up!