Quote:
Originally Posted by Nebe
Furthermore. Whose making a bad decision? The person who ships factory production overseas or the worker who looses his or her job from that decision and has to work at McDonald's ? Everything isn't black and white
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"Bad decision" is a value judgment. And your question is rhetorical in that it frames, or judges, the decision by your values. You, obviously, believe that producing product overseas is bad. I assume that the person who "ships" it overseas thinks it was good, beneficial to the company, to do so.
I also assume that you value the jobs as a service to the employees rather than as an asset/liability to the company. You and Bernie Sanders would probably agree on that. I'm guessing that both of you would prefer that companies ran their business the way government does its. Even though, examples of those that operate sort of that way eventually, if they succeed in staying in business at all, get bloated, full of waste, and amass unsustainable debt. But, as long as Big Brother government can bail them out, that's OK.
I also assume that "shipping jobs overseas" is a decision to balance production, profit, and sustainability rather than a mean spirited sticking it to American workers.
I also assume that there is a level of excess wage that a company can sustain if the total process of production, delivery, and sales is still as, or more, profitable than "shipping" the jobs elsewhere. There was a time, in the 1950's/1960's if I recall correctly, when the wage structure in the auto industry was four times more costly in the U.S. than it would have been in Mexico. But the cost of moving jobs to Mexico would have incurred other costs, such as building infrastructure and so forth, so would have been overall more costly. But when the differential became 7X rather than 4X (and rising) it was economically responsible (good decision rather than bad) to move some jobs there. That became a growing pattern for corporations as the cost of producing in the U.S. kept rising, and the cost in less developed countries remained stagnant. That may be trending in the other direction as wages have become stagnant here and starting to rise a bit elsewhere. If that keeps up, we may have more and more job growth here. That remains to be seen--if the government can manage to let it happen without more of the regulatory distortions which also had caused the price of labor to rise here in the past.
As you say, everything isn't black and white. I don't think Bernie Sanders would be prone to let the markets correct themselves.