|
Helsing posted:First of all I'm far from the only person to raise a stink about the state of IP law. Many economists, not to mention many people in the IT sector, have made similar complaints. I'm not going to go to bat for drug IP here. That's not my thing. But my point was that we chose to enforce drug IP domestically, therefore it makes sense to try and extend it globally for similar reasons (whatever they might be). You're over-thinking things by searching for some special motive behind enforcing IP globally when obviously we like it enough to have it domestically. quote:Outsourcing is a way of reducing labour costs. That is, almost by definition, going to hurt the position of labour. Yes and no. You missed the point in my following paragraphs. The immediate intent of outsourcing is certainly to cut costs, but that's the intent of deploying technology too. I think you're still making a mistake of driving a wedge between outsourcing/globalization and technology. They're identical in terms of this debate in regards to their effect on the domestic economy. If society throws X resources at a machine that produces Y, it's the same as trading X resources and getting Y back (don't confuse X as money that "circulates", I'm talking about actual costs/losses). So outsourcing has the same exact productivity improving potential of technology. One thing that happened though is that outsourcing came later, after waves of technology had hit the same workers, and was something of a final blow. Plus, it feels different because of the foreign workers involved. So this explains part of the negative connotations. But outsourcing doesn't have special properties here where we can classify the intent of one as being different than the other regarding its impact on "the position of labor". And it's no accident that they effect the same types of workers - jobs that can be outsourced heavily overlap with jobs that can be replaced by machines. You need out be consistent on how you see these two things fitting together. Like I said, I doubt you'll argue that the database was created by the business class to undermine labor - but it, and other technologies we take for granted have wiped out more jobs than outsourcing. quote:There was an extended and conscious effort by businesses to retake control of society in the 70s and 80s. You can see that playing out in several ways. For instance, businesses began to pool their funds into Chambers of Commerce and other collective organizations so that they could lobby together and therefore increase their influence. Movement conservatives took control of the Republican party and instituted a hard shift to the right under Reagan. Huge sums of money were made available to fund a constellation of right wing think tanks that began to push right wing policies into the media. Extensive public relations campaigns were conducted - men like Milton Friedman were given prominent public roles as columnists, TV hosts and book writers and then tasked with defending the Free Enterprise system. This is all well documented. Bold: No kidding. And the thing that's new in this entire section isn't business's desire to cut costs, or get control, it's the ability to build that factory overseas. That's the difference and that's the root cause of much of the course of the next couple decades in terms of labor power. quote:You can say this but the underlying data doesn't support your argument. The share of GDP going to wages has decreased and the share of GDP going to profits has increased. Economic inequality has also risen substantially. Globally, without question, it's the poor who have benefited the most from globalization (specifically the 10th to 60th global percentile). Literally it's not even close if you factor in the marginal utility of money. Globally poverty has been plummeting and inequality has stayed basically the same. Also, again it needs to be pointed out that the rich benefiting from something doesn't mean the rich got together and planned it. And it's less likely when you can see that a decent chunk of them didn't benefit. Just as an aside you probably don't appreciate how different my tone would be regarding globalization/capitalism if it weren't for the large broad hill in that graph above. We need to be aware that we exist in that valley. Everyone except us and our first world middle class friends are benefiting economically at rates that have rarely been seen in history, and never for as many people. Personally I doubt that increased GDP or increased technology are going to make the next generation of the first world much better off than us today, and there is a chance that it will make them worse. But such isn't the case for the poor. So I'm somewhat indifferent to the need for capitalism in the first world (though I do think others still want the growth it's supposed to provide, and most alternatives suck), but not for developing countries. quote:Uhh, the entire premise of globalization has been to entrench investor rights, enforce the mobility of capital, and to force other countries to enact specific policies on trade, government size and numerous other areas. If you're not willing to apply your definition of "free trade" to U.S. interstate trade then your definition doesn't come close to existing on the global stage. As you know, interstate trade is more open than any actual international trade, where despite the notion of "free trade" we have byzantine protections anyways. I'd like you to expand on what you'd actually like to see. I find it utterly implausible to imagine how the first world throwing up protections is expected to benefit poor people. Because it's inevitably the first world whose going to get the better end of these types of negotiations. Developing countries actually depend far more on imports from the first world (irreplaceable medical/industrial/computing equipment) than the other way around. quote:Free trade (plus union busting and a number of other factors that can't be taken in isolation) didn't just hurt the power of manufacturing workers, it hurt the power of workers vis-a-vis owners. That's why labour's share of GDP is decreasing. The weather is linked to wages and profits too, but has no businesses in this discussion. I'm not denying that immigration is linked, but I'm pointing out that it's an utterly distinct issue, with a political landscape entirely its own. Therefore it's not instructive of anything that we push "free trade" without simultaneously pushing to import truckloads of foreign doctors. This isn't a thing that's inconsistent, especially given where immigration currently stands. I'll just expand on previous arguments by noting that doctors aren't even instructive of a general trend because most professionals that aren't involved in local licencing, which is most, are under the exact same type of foreign competition as low skilled workers - and sometimes as a direct result of IP. IP helps domestic companies only to the extent that the U.S. has valuable IP. But the potential for foreign companies to compete on IP is right there all the time (See Apple vs Samsung). This effectively puts U.S. scientists, engineers, designers etc under direct foreign competition. Independent of IP, there is nothing preventing domestic companies from contracting foreign marketing firms, design firms and engineering firms to replace high paid U.S. professionals in those fields (without getting into H1B's) and this literally happens all the time. So it's borderline disingenuous to call out fields which are entangled in local licensing all over the globe (not to mention the necessity of highly local knowledge in some cases like lawyers) as instructive of general trends protecting the professional class. Generally speaking those protections just don't exist. quote:I don't think you've actually addressed the underlying argument here. If we're better off opening up international competition in the manufacturing sector then why are we simultaneously making it harder to globalize professional services like medicine? I already addressed this. We do make it very easy for foreigners to compete in almost all professional fields from the engineer right on up to the chief executive. So what's the difference then? The difference is that the majority of new workers the U.S. found itself competing with were low skilled - like about 1.3 billion Chinese people who at current levels of education are competing almost entirely with our low skilled workers, but not our professionals. asdf32 fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Aug 24, 2014 |
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 15:20
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 18, 2024 08:17 |
|
|
So how does all this relate to too much democracy again? I've kinda lost the point here I'm embarrassed to admit.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 10:54
|
|
|
Democracy is the holy cow of our times for all Leftist, even though it simply seems to not be working for the last decades, the solution always has to be more ~Democracy~. As Democracy can't really be discussed, since the problem is obviously that we need 'more democracy' all talks about it will end up in something else: how to end corruption, how to stop excessive party financing, how to get people involved, etc.. Never can we really discuss how the plural multi party system, has maybe run it's course and something else entirely might be in order.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 12:55
|
|
|
Fados posted:Democracy is the holy cow of our times for all Leftist, even though it simply seems to not be working for the last decades, the solution always has to be more ~Democracy~. As Democracy can't really be discussed, since the problem is obviously that we need 'more democracy' all talks about it will end up in something else: how to end corruption, how to stop excessive party financing, how to get people involved, etc.. Never can we really discuss how the plural multi party system, has maybe run it's course and something else entirely might be in order. Is there another system that hasn't been tried, or has been tried and has shown itself to have a better ROI across its entire population?
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 12:57
|
|
|
I have no idea, but maybe you cant tell if the feudal system in Charlemagne's empire had the most awesome ROI for the time in the 814 AD? How about the ROI in China today? They don't seem very democratic but their kind capitalism seems to be working a lot better.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 13:04
|
|
|
Fados posted:I have no idea, but maybe you cant tell if the feudal system in Charlemagne's empire had the most awesome ROI for the time in the 814 AD? How about the ROI in China today? They don't seem very democratic but their kind capitalism seems to be working a lot better. China has tons of economic problems though? edit:Societies as a whole do seem to be more towards a more authoritarian bent though.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 13:05
|
|
|
I need to do a comparison between China and America, but normalized for development cycle. What do you think is a good time frame... 50s and early 60s America?
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 13:08
|
|
|
The point is not about some economic development theory. It's that China did get a middle class and the populations are generally better as for America and Western Europe the reverse is happening. And China did it with a non democracy.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 13:14
|
|
|
"generally better" requires a relative comparison which will be skewed if you don't account for their different stages of economic development. I mean, China could implode in massive civil unrest leading to an authoritarian crackdown which guts the middle class and then all of a sudden "better" won't apply anymore.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 13:16
|
|
|
I agree, but the same could be said of the West, look at Ferguson, the protests and crackdowns in Greece. If another financial bubble exploded tomorrow like the one in 2008 do you think western democracies would be able to deal with it and resume business as usual?
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 13:22
|
|
|
Fados posted:I agree, but the same could be said of the West, look at Ferguson, the protests and crackdowns in Greece. If another financial bubble exploded tomorrow like the one in 2008 do you think western democracies would be able to deal with it and resume business as usual? Yep because the system is rigged in their favor. edit: By system I mean finance in this case.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 13:35
|
|
|
SirKibbles posted:Yep because the system is rigged in their favor. Sure, finance would probably survive but what about democracy as such? If another crisis implied another round of bailouts, and austerity cuts in educations, public sector and healthcare, taking into account that the last European Union elections had less than half of voter turnover, you can see that the way to way to a Russian style oligarchy, with the manly nationalistic leader on top doesn't seem that far away.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 13:45
|
|
|
Fados posted:Sure, finance would probably survive but what about democracy as such? If we had to have another round of bailouts, and austerity cuts in educations, public sector and healthcare, taking into account that the last European Union elections had less than half of voter turnover, you can see that the way to way to a Russian style oligarchy, with the manly nationalistic leader on top doesn't seem that far away. Well heck when anyone talks about western democracy I hear it as western 'democracy' anyhow...
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 13:46
|
|
|
Fados posted:Sure, finance would probably survive but what about democracy as such? If another crisis implied another round of bailouts, and austerity cuts in educations, public sector and healthcare, taking into account that the last European Union elections had less than half of voter turnover, you can see that the way to way to a Russian style oligarchy, with the manly nationalistic leader on top doesn't seem that far away. Democracy isn't a power structure that's failing from some internal error, but because it's being ruthlessly gutted by those who stand to benefit from its death. Maybe if working class people stopped blaming each other, and focused their sights on the people with actual power, we wouldn't be in this mess.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 14:24
|
|
|
But doesn't the fact that it IS being gutted imply that it does fail as a power structure when paired with capitalism? Why couldn't the multi party system generate a movement in the last decades that was able to let's say 'cut through the bullshit' and galvanize the working classes? Doesn't this imply some deficiency right at the core of the concept? The fact is that it all major changes in the egalitarian conditions of the masses needed to come either from a revolutionary position or from a post-cataclysmic (new deal in after ww2) kind of catarsis.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 16:06
|
|
|
rudatron posted:Maybe if working class people stopped blaming each other, and focused their sights on the people with actual power, we wouldn't be in this mess. That's an internal error.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 16:12
|
|
|
Fados posted:But doesn't the fact that it IS being gutted imply that it does fail as a power structure when paired with capitalism? I mean, Germany has its issues but has kept a social welfare state and (if you consider only West Germany) democratic institutions, if flawed. Germany isn't exactly a poor place, or a place without banks, rich people, etc.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 01:53
|
|
|
That's actually a great example. To me it's a mystery how they managed to sacrifice salary raises for years on end while the rest of Europe simply went into a kind of spending spree. They seem to live in a bizarro bubble in terms of politics compared to the rest of Europe. If I had to bet I'd say the holocaust and post reunification as cultural factors are really the culprit.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 04:45
|
|
|
Fados posted:That's actually a great example. To me it's a mystery how they managed to sacrifice salary raises for years on end while the rest of Europe simply went into a kind of spending spree. They seem to live in a bizarro bubble in terms of politics compared to the rest of Europe. If I had to bet I'd say the holocaust and post reunification as cultural factors are really the culprit. German trade unions are much more integrated into the leadership of German companies than unions are elsewhere. That leads to a point of view more aligned with that of management, because to some extent labor is management in a German company, and as a consequence Germans were able to take the long view and accept some painful short term sacrifices that paid off in greater productivity and a functional welfare state. Also, the German export sector benefited like crazy from the structural imbalances created by putting all the countries in the euro zone onto a common currency. Nessus posted:I don't think that necessarily follows, though it may indicate a weakness of democracy as we understand it. Why skip the plausible explanation that there's a weakness in the class analysis?
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 14:26
|
|
|
Fados posted:But doesn't the fact that it IS being gutted imply that it does fail as a power structure when paired with capitalism? Why couldn't the multi party system generate a movement in the last decades that was able to let's say 'cut through the bullshit' and galvanize the working classes? Doesn't this imply some deficiency right at the core of the concept? The fact is that it all major changes in the egalitarian conditions of the masses needed to come either from a revolutionary position or from a post-cataclysmic (new deal in after ww2) kind of catarsis.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 14:52
|
|
|
Wouldn't the same criticisms of Democracy apply to Republics? Hell it's easier in some ways because there's less people to bribe,plus apathy setting in when nothing changes? That's my issue with alot of criticisms of Democracy they aren't just arguments against Democracy but end up being arguments against allowing anything but a small minority of people running everything. And yet the people that make these arguments say they support Republics. Honestly I think it's a social thing no ones going to come out and say they don't think everyone should vote too close to fascism/caste system stuff.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 14:59
|
|
|
rudatron posted:Not at all, the failure to galvanize is not from an internal fault or failure in a core concept, it's an external attack from those vested interests. It's a weakness induced from years of siege against working class interests. Capitalism is swallowing democracy up, I'm arguing for the opposite, that democratic power structures must supersede capitalism as a whole. You're correct in that that must come from a situation where existing conditions are overturned (ie a revolutionary situation), but it's not because democracy is intrinsically 'weak' or that capitalism is intrinsically 'strong', it's that the game is rigged in favor of capitalism and the capitalist class. Any power structure can succeed when everything is already in its favor, when it already has hegemony How can you say the economic system is external to the democratic political structure? It's constitutionally internal to it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 16:49
|
|
|
It's external because capitalism imposes the same stresses on any system of government. Money talks and bullshit walks.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 06:20
|
|
|
asdf32 posted:How can you say the economic system is external to the democratic political structure? It's constitutionally internal to it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 06:35
|
|
|
Nessus posted:"Capitalism" in the sense of the efforts of various owners of capital hunting a return exist trans-nationally. Even the most powerful states such as the US do not have anywhere near the decisive influence in other nations that they do in their own territory, and what is more they may get bought off and so forth. Perhaps if democracy has a weakness, it is this: capital, like Dracula, is very powerful and very hard to uninvite. I'm not sure that's what Rudatron was saying. It's very much supposed to be the case that the economic system operates as a component of the larger political structure with the government controlling the market through laws and regulations from every angle. More broadly the point of government is to protect against threats both internal and external. If it can't do that against categories of threats that will inevitably pop up then that's a fundamental problem with the structure - a boat that capsizes in any wave isn't a stable boat. The case that needs to be made is that blocks of power like the ones that arise from pooled capital can be completely eliminated. I think that's a hard argument to make. And it's far harder to make if, as you suggest, democracy can't even stand up to external capital (though I think it can).
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 17:10
|
|
|
The whole argument also assumes that you need to be democratic in order to be socialist and you don't. Kind of like how people always thought you had to be Democracies or Republics to be Capitalist and a lot of countries proved that untrue. Which should freak out any Westerners given how many people here are in favor of that.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2014 12:40
|
|
|
SirKibbles posted:The whole argument also assumes that you need to be democratic in order to be socialist and you don't. Kind of like how people always thought you had to be Democracies or Republics to be Capitalist and a lot of countries proved that untrue. Which should freak out any Westerners given how many people here are in favor of that. I'd actually argue that you have to meet some minimum standard of democracy in order to be meaningfully considered Socialist. In its most basic definition, Socialism means that the means of production are owned and controlled collectively by the workers, which by extension means that at least the workers need to have a say in how the state and/or society is run. If this isn't present you can't talk about any meaningful control of the means of production, and thus the society in question fails to meet the basic criteria of Socialism.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2014 12:55
|
|
|
Cerebral Bore posted:I'd actually argue that you have to meet some minimum standard of democracy in order to be meaningfully considered Socialist. In its most basic definition, Socialism means that the means of production are owned and controlled collectively by the workers, which by extension means that at least the workers need to have a say in how the state and/or society is run. If this isn't present you can't talk about any meaningful control of the means of production, and thus the society in question fails to meet the basic criteria of Socialism. Yeah and you can easily be a Republic for that you don't have to be Democratic. You could also be a Technocracy really easily too. Plus Marxist variates have a dictatorship of the proletariat which is the proletariat pushing everyone else out of democracy. Not to mention revolutions are by their nature pretty undemocratic.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2014 13:11
|
|
|
asdf32 posted:I'm not sure that's what Rudatron was saying. It's very much supposed to be the case that the economic system operates as a component of the larger political structure with the government controlling the market through laws and regulations from every angle.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2014 22:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 18, 2024 08:17 |
|
|
Apologies for the long delays here but I've been busy. I've only partially answered your post in the interests of brevity, if I left something out you really wanted addressed then let me know. I do feel as though we've started to move away from any specific argument and are starting to just bicker in general, so maybe we can think of a way to refocus the discussion. I'm going to try and spend a bit of time thinking about what our fundamental disagreements here really are, you might want to do the same so that we can maybe distil this debate down to some fundamental points. Also, I feel as though there are some parts of your argument I'm not really clear on. You promised a longer response to my post on how American 'democracy' is totally unresponsive to the bottom third of income earners (and only selectively responsible to the middle third). It's also not really clear to me what your response to the union busting of the 1970s is. It seems as though you've basically just ignored these parts of the argument, but they're pretty significant in my mind. I mean, sure, you quoted the part of my post that discusses union busting. But you didn't actually have much to say or any new evidence to provide. All you did was repeat your unsupported assertion that the real cause of labour's decline is globalization rather than an aggressive campaign of illegal firings (combined, of course, with outsourcing and the introduction of labour saving technology). asdf32 posted:I'm not going to go to bat for drug IP here. That's not my thing. "We" enforce it because it benefits the same class of people who are the primary beneficiaries of globalization. That's my point: the policies our government has been enacting both domestically and internationally are prejudiced in favour of certain interest groups, at the expense of the rest of us. quote:Yes and no. You missed the point in my following paragraphs. But under capitalism that is the motivation behind most technological innovation. That is precisely the flaw with capitalism: innovations that would otherwise be beneficial to society as a whole, such as technological advancement or foreign trade, are only allowed to proceed under conditions where they benefit capitalists. Motivation doesn't really matter here. Whether or not the guy who came up with the database system was intentionally trying to hurt the position of labour that is generally the effect of labour saving technology unless there are countervailing powers like unions or an activist government. quote:Bold: No kidding. And the thing that's new in this entire section isn't business's desire to cut costs, or get control, it's the ability to build that factory overseas. That's the difference and that's the root cause of much of the course of the next couple decades in terms of labor power. Well business did become more motivated to cut costs in the 1970s because the profit rate dropped and that made the generous concessions won by labour in the last few decades harder to tolerate. So while it's true that businesses will generally always be happy to cut costs that doesn't mean that their appetite for cost cutting is the same in all time periods. But more importantly the point here is that the ability to move factories overseas like that wasn't just dependent on technology, it was dependent on a change in political sensibilities and regulations. It's very hard to imagine in 1950 that this kind of behaviour would have been tolerated in the same way. That's what you seem to be missing - the political change that had to accompany the economic and technological changes to make globalization in its present form a possibility. quote:
First of all, please source this image. Second of all I'd suggest that if we want to look at changes in global poverty then we need to use more specific breakdowns at the level of regions or countries rather than the entire globe. Aggregating statistics at such a high level can be very misleading. Third, and building on point two, if you look at large swathes of Africa, Eastern Europe or Latin America then the era of Free Trade has been disastrous. A lot - not all, but a lot - of the growth in income on that chart is coming from Asia (or else it's coming from Latin America in the commodity boom period, which doesn't necessarily prove what you want it to prove). In particular, it is coming from countries that consciously ignored free trade doctrine and only used it selectively to develop themselves. China is hardly a conventional free trade success story and citing it as such is highly problematic. China, for instance, has not opened itself up very much to global capital flows and has largely financed its growth through the savings of its own population and through technology that wasn't necessarily acquired legally. Indeed you're ignoring the extent to which many of these regions of the world were growing rapidly in the 50s and 60s, only to have this progress halted by during the 1970s and 1980s, and then resumed (though more weakly than before) in the 1990s. Just pointing at some single stat, frozen in time, and pretending it tells the whole story is misleading. Finally, correlation is not causation. Much of the development that you're referring to has nothing to do with trade per se and everything to do with the diffusion of technology and best practices in business. Even neoclassical economists admit that they mostly don't understand how economic development works. It often has soemthing to do with trade but mostly it comes from that nebulous residual category called "total factory productivity". In conclusion, your claim that globalization has been good for the global poor needs to be heavily qualified because 1) it's not clear how much it has helped them and 2) it's not clear to what extent this is because of trade vs. general technological diffusion and catch up. If you take the example of the Soviet Union you'll see that you don't need a capitalist economy to have rapid growth. If you're starting from a low baseline then it is possible to grow rapidly regardless of your economic system. quote:Also, again it needs to be pointed out that the rich benefiting from something doesn't mean the rich got together and planned it. And it's less likely when you can see that a decent chunk of them didn't benefit. You'll have to define 'decent chunk'. Also keep in mind that I'm not crafting some kind of conspiracy theory here. It's a matter of record that trade deals like NAFTA were crafted based on consultation with businesses and advocated for by think tanks supported by corporate money. So yes, without question globalization was "planned" by the rich. It was literally developed by politicians and businessmen and diplomats and all those groups clearly qualify as "rich". quote:Just as an aside you probably don't appreciate how different my tone would be regarding globalization/capitalism if it weren't for the large broad hill in that graph above. We need to be aware that we exist in that valley. Everyone except us and our first world middle class friends are benefiting economically at rates that have rarely been seen in history, and never for as many people. Personally I doubt that increased GDP or increased technology are going to make the next generation of the first world much better off than us today, and there is a chance that it will make them worse. But such isn't the case for the poor. So I'm somewhat indifferent to the need for capitalism in the first world (though I do think others still want the growth it's supposed to provide, and most alternatives suck), but not for developing countries. This is simply wrong. quote:If you're not willing to apply your definition of "free trade" to U.S. interstate trade then your definition doesn't come close to existing on the global stage. As you know, interstate trade is more open than any actual international trade, where despite the notion of "free trade" we have byzantine protections anyways. That's because Free Trade is mostly just a buzzword used to mystify the actual way that globalization functions. That's my point. We'll never see Free Trade consistently applied because the main purpose of the theory is to justify the self interested actions of the people who own and run our society. Hence why I'm pointing out the inconsistencies of how we apply Free Trade. quote:I'd like you to expand on what you'd actually like to see. I find it utterly implausible to imagine how the first world throwing up protections is expected to benefit poor people. Because it's inevitably the first world whose going to get the better end of these types of negotiations. Developing countries actually depend far more on imports from the first world (irreplaceable medical/industrial/computing equipment) than the other way around. Economic growth rates were actually higher prior to the 'Free Trade' era of the 1980s and 90s. Here's Latin America's GDP per capita:  The bad old days of import substitution and high trade barriers saw faster growth than the era of globalization. Obviously these stats call for a deeper analysis, something I'd be happy to get into in more detail. But the point is that the sitaution here is much more complicated than you seem to think. Free Trade hasn't lead to some kind of unprecedented whirlwind of growth. In fact it's coincided with a general slowdown in growth rates for much of the world (and many of the places that are still growing rapidly are either enjoying the one time transfer of rural populations into cities or they are experiencing commodity booms that are unsustainable in the longer term, which, again, further muddies the waters and makes it unclear how real or sustainable some of this growth actually is). quote:The weather is linked to wages and profits too, but has no businesses in this discussion. I'm not denying that immigration is linked, but I'm pointing out that it's an utterly distinct issue, with a political landscape entirely its own. Therefore it's not instructive of anything that we push "free trade" without simultaneously pushing to import truckloads of foreign doctors. This isn't a thing that's inconsistent, especially given where immigration currently stands. Weather isn't controlled by political and legal regimes, immigration is, so your analogy makes no sense. If you don't think business stakeholders have influenced immigration laws or enforcement then I don't really know what to tell you. And if you don't see the irony of the fact that in the 1990s the US was simultaneously making it easier to import foreign manufactured goods and harder to obtain the services of a foreign doctor then again, I don't really know what else to tell you. That, to me, is a pretty stark illustration of how some groups can lobby the government for protection more successfully than others.
|
|
#
?
Sep 8, 2014 18:28
|
|
