U.s. - Solar Panel Maker Moves Work To China

[mfp123]

Good boy, a pat on the head, go to the top of the class. We'll make you a Prefect, or a journalist or a professor of economics.

But seriously. The work will go to the cheapest labour. You know that. Every consumer MUST be a wage earner, if not actually a producer.

The point of work is not to pay for stuff as such, but to provide for our needs. The few productive workers are providing the needs of

the many unproductive employees.

With technological progress we can provide for our needs with a minimal effort. A whole population doing PRODUCTIVE work for three days a week could grow plenty of food and stack lots of bricks on top of one another. Essentials could be cheap, non-essentials would probably be more expensive.

The only other logical conclusion is that we all eat less to compete with the lowest waged workers of the day, to be finaly beaten by robots that will produce incredibly cheap stuf that almost no-one will be able to buy.

you miss the point about why we work. take your example about robots, if robot could do our work we wouldnt need to work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year to get the things we need.

cheap labour allows you to get the things you want for very little effort in return. if everyone had a slave to do our exact same job , we would enjoy life at someone elses expense. a slave doesnt make you poor because he puts you out of work.

you also forget that when we buy things from abroad there is only one place these countries can spend their pounds sterling - in the UK.

if you think well a loss of jobs would make us uncompetitive, and thus we have little to offer the world in return - if the UK was uncompetitive the value of our currency would naturally fall, in which case the value of our wages would fall and make us more attractive to work.

the market is self correcting.

the question is therfore why would you want to force down the value of our wages, if we are in a naturally stronger state than other countries?

you would be essentially be pre-empting the problems by making the value of the UK fall, when in fact it should be strong.

i.e to prevent the value of the UK falling, which you think would happen due to a loss of jobs, you want to raise the costs of imports... which makes the value of wages in the UK fall.

that makes no sense.

its like saying to prevent my house from catching fire, im going to burn it down so that there is nothing left that can catch fire.

Edited January 17, 2011 by mfp123

[Bloo Loo]

snip

the market is self correcting.

the question is therfore why would you want to force down the value of our wages, snip

I would rather keep wages the same and see some serious correcting deflation.

That is of course the last thing a banker wants, of course.

[mfp123]

edit - duplicate post.

Edited January 17, 2011 by mfp123

[wonderpup]

At what point do we become satisfied that the competition has played by the rules though?

Take Tescos for example, they're effectively putting me out of job by providing my groceries at below cost price (from my perspective), would you conclude therefore that Tesco's should be forced to raise their prices to a level that allows me to compete?

Who would benefit from that? It would end in economic annihilation.

Jobs aren't ends in themselves remember, they're a means to an end. If we can achieve those ends more efficiently then given a free choice humans will naturally gravitate towards the less costly solution. This isn't bad for the macro -economy, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Both you and Tesco compete under the same legal constraints and social norms. But suppose Tesco was given a unique suspension of the mimunum wage laws, allowing them to pay lower than anyone else- would this still be a 'competitive' environment? Or would some kind of rubicon have been crossed at this point?

The dirty little truth about Globalisation is that it does not exist- we do not live in a world where the same legal constraints and social norms prevail everwhere- the very point Goldsmith was making.

The idea that what is good for the individual is always good for society as a whole is not always true. Suppose it were the case that 80% of all uk buisness's could increase their profits by sacking their UK workforce and offshoring the jobs- taken on a case by case basis each one of those companies could prove to you that they will be better offby doing this.

But if they all did it the result would be a disaster as mass unemployment sucked the life out of UK PLC leading many of these companies to fail.

So while it's perfectly possible to argue that case by case globalised free trade is a good thing for all- the aggregate outcome of it might turn out to be bad for almost everyone- one only has to look at the absurd pantomime horse the world economy now is, with a Chinese head and American rear end, each stitched together in a hopeless dependency on the other they dare not abandon for fear of internal collapse- this is the reality of globalised free trade today.

Edited January 17, 2011 by wonderpup