Devil's Advocate question

Just honestly think about this question for a while:

Let's say you were born in India, and by age 20 you have two choices: one is to toil in the fields all year long and possibly fall prey to corrupt officials. Another is to work 7 days a week telling Americans to calm down when Windows Vista crashes. Which will you prefer?

Or let's say you were born in Podunktown, China, and at 20 years of age you can choose to work in a dangerous coal mine run by sleazebags, or you can choose to work 14 hours a day in a toy factory. Which would you prefer?

This is just something no one has asked before, and I'm playing devil's advocate by asking this.

actually ill paraphrase

It's great slaves are being treated so much better nowadays. But they are still slaves.

Years ago the Los Angeles garment district attracted illegal immigrants to work in their factories. They weren't union jobs but they did have to pay minimum wage, collect taxes and obey labor laws. If they didn't they were fined and taken to court. When NAFTA came along the factories moved to Mexico. Well, wasn't it much better to bring the jobs to the workers than vice versa? Or that was the wisdom at the time. But then those low paying factory jobs moved to China where they are even more low paying if not out and out slave labor.

Those workers are not going to improve their lot either because there will always be a cheaper pool of labor somewhere when the workers start getting demanding. I don't know what the answer is when there will always be countries that exploit their working class for the benefit corporations. I do believe we need to pass laws here in America that demands production and labor standards from the factories making the goods overseas and places tariffs on the goods imported. However, at the end of the day, we really need to bring our manufacturing base back to America.

Corporations despise Americans.
They will NEVER willingly return a single job or facility to this nation.
Any employment opportunities will have to be created from scratch and then protected from
the corporate "persons" who will try to destroy them.

I entered the world of needing a job or selling myself to a corporation, it was legally harder for companies to become international behemouths. We need to go back to those laws that demanded incorporation in each state they operate in and that didn't let them become monopolies or become multinational. We need to break them up if they want to do business with us or forget about it. This could stimulate new businesses to arise in their place that are smaller and better regulated. We can't sell our American companies to foreign companies. It's just not right.

You talk about the need to prevent monopolies by keeping out "multinationals". But by discouraging foreign investment, you could strengthen monopolies instead.

Ford and GM cars are crap now, you think? Well if it weren't for the fact that Toyota and Honda were allowed to import cars to the US, the Big Three would make even crappier cars because of a lack of competition. And I'm absolutely sure that the Big Three would collude prices so they could rake in more profits while the consumer puts up with overpriced lemons. This cannot happen now because Toyota makes better cars at lower prices and forced the Big Three to either make better cars or get out of this world.

What's even better is that Toyota has for many years had auto plants in North America to take advantage of lower transportation costs to markets. So your premise that multinationals never willingly employ workers in the US is false.

In Canada, we've put up with sky-high phone and internet bills for a long time because the incumbent carriers have formed an oligarchy by monopolizing the infrastructure. It's also because of lobbying by those carriers that the government has delayed measures to open up to foreign competition. Other countries like the UK and Australia have seen their telecom sectors ripped open to multinationals like Vodafone and O2, and their phone bills have plunged.

So what's really necessary is for the government to refuse any handouts to any big corporations, protect the consumer's interests, and open up the market to anyone who wants to invest.

situation we have here in the USA has gotten out of hand. I remember the car market back in the fifties and sixties. My first car was an import because it was all I could afford at the time. It was a piece of junk too that imploded five years later. If I remember correctly though, there were strict import rules, tariffs and minimum safety standards that had to be met before the car could be sold in the USA. It didn't hurt Detroit back then but it did force them to go back to the drawing board to start manufacturing more affordable autos for the working class.

I'm not against imports. I just want our home manufactured products to be competitive with them and we can't do that without excise tax and laws protecting our home products. We also need to keep them from being all the market. I always thought that retailers like Wal-Mart should be required to carry 60% of their inventory in USA manufactured goods and the imports should have enough excise tax tagged on them to make their prices competitive with the American products. Sure things might go back to being more expensive, but then we might recycle more and waste less. I can remember back when I could sell my TV after I got another one. Now all I can do is junk it.

Also, safety standards seem to have been thrown out the window. Look at the lead paint toy debacle from China for instance. Back in those days there would have been import safety standards in place for those items.

Why do you present only two choices for the person born in India?

There is at least one other choice: A Decent Job at Decent Wages working for the betterment of people in India and the world.

And why do you present only two choices for the person born in (Podunktown??!!) China?

There is at least one other choice: A Decent job at decent wages working for the betterment of people in China and the world.

By thinking that people in China and India have only the two choices you outline, we condemn them to lives of misery.

I'd prefer to think that we would all work for the betterment of people around the world.

We have a choice, here, people, and we COULD compete with ...oh...I don't know...EUROPE?


Hello! THIS is a most important choice, and must be made soon -- which way do we go?

People living in developing nations don't have the opportunities as in developed nations. We take this for granite in America

For many, you either work on a farm, or get a little better paying job by working in a factory. By getting better jobs, they are improving their standard of living and of those around them. Developement and better paying jobs takes time to grow, and it won't just magically happen over night.

In China, wages are increasing and their standard of living is improving, it just takes time.

the answer is easy. Really, whatever you love to do, will not look like a job at all. OR, you could leave the country.

quote This is just something no one has asked before, and I'm playing devil's advocate by asking this. /quote

Well maybe not exactly in that way.

I wish this site had a "quote" feature........

People are 'free' to do whatever they want all around the globe,
just sometimes they die doing it.

Ask John Lennon.

If I were born in India, I would hope that I could do better than
raising rice, or answering calls from idiots that can't make their
computer work.

There are soooooo many more options.

think that the poor in third world countries have options. If there were options we wouldn't have so many starving people in the world.

I believe that the person in India or China would ask themselves these things before making the choice:

Which job is going to put food on the table for my family?
Which job will keep me and my family safest?

no two cultures are the same.

India's disdain of women (selective abortions, dowries, and so on) shows how paltry our capitalist system is compared to theirs.

I won't deny naivety, but as another DUer once mentioned something along the lines of "Americans wonder why the Chinese don't care about life, whereas the Chinese wonder why we do care about life" and there you have it. One big-arsed inference and nothing more.

There's NO third choice unless you're lucky and know a corrupt someone. Someone suggested they could leave the country for somewhere else. Millions of Indians and Chinese work abroad at low-paid jobs (e.g. Indian construction workers in Dubai, or Chinese workers making luxury clothes in Italy). If you're middle class and educated, then you would require H1B or something similar to take professional jobs. I want to see how many people support H1B on this forum...

And don't call me insensitive, because my grandparents were persecuted by Mao's Red Guards and my parents got scholarships to leave China.