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Notes -
The thing I haven't seen anyone really address is that usually, the Comparative Advantage in question is lax safety and environmental laws. Sure, we have less land well-suited for Cocoa plants than South America. But the reason why it's cheaper to build a factory in China than the US is because China has no qualms with forced labor, unsafe conditions, and pollution. The government of China is able to force people to produce things that there is no demand for, including brand new ghost cities.
Are people just ok with this, morally and ethically? Is there any concern that this is a strategy that China has been employing to explicitly hollow out the American Industrial Capability which won WWII for the Allies?
The forced labor concern don’t apply to Europr, Japan, South Korea, Israel, or New Zealand, which have all had tariffs raised.
Yes, this is true. I would be for a kind of trade union that where the main requirement for entry is not exploiting their workers or environments (and maybe combined with a military pact.) Of course, the EU might have a different understanding of what that means than the US...
I'm not super informed on this but my impression is that I don't really like the American leftist habit of labeling working conditions they don't like as having "low labor standards" when the alternative is just those workers not being employed at all. I suspect most European countries have standards above this even if I wouldn't particularly like those jobs myself. It's easier for me to believe China doesn't have them given their track record on human rights in general and that they have labor that's much more accurately described as forced or coerced. So the US need not be the gold standard for what acceptable labor standards are. There is still no need for any tariffs at all on Europe and the other countries I mentioned (except maybe Israel but we can start by cutting off other sources of funding to them first).
I was referring to European countries making it almost impossible to fire an employee without a solid record of misbehavior and prior notice.
America decides, "We will only have free trade with countries that maintains worker accidents under a certain threshold and has solid enforcement against slave labor on exports."
Then Europe says, "We'll make our own free trade organization with countries that have a good enough social safety net and do not allow companies to fire their employees willy nilly." And the US gets kicked out of the global trade anyways.
Except that would never happen, because they would love to sell to us. It's mostly a thought experiment to try to assess where the line is that we wouldn't' allow countries to cross. China at one end, Canada at the other, where is the line drawn?
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