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"Reality" is only an alt-ego for addressing controversial topics when the author is a little too far ahead of the crowd and doesn't feel like attracting antipathy for a long time before the crowd comes around to his way of thinking. The gradual shift in the crowd thinking has made Reality's POV's less "outragesous" than when they first came out, but more like "common wisdom" nowadays.
Fredrick Bastiat eloquently addressed the issue of lower-cost producers allegedly destroying/stealing jobs more than a century ago: such sentiment is like the candle makers' guild trying to convince the government to ban sun light on account of unfair competition! If the Chinese, or anyone else, want to poison themselves in order to sell us goods at lower price, it's their problem.
The real problem here is why hasn't there been more jobs created after goods are available for cheaper. When goods and resources are available for lower prices, there should be more jobs created to make use of them. e.g. when computational power gets cheaper, more jobs created to make use of them, when transportation cost got cheaper (from horse to cars), more jobs emerged to take advantage of them . . . despite the ostensible loss of horse cab driver jobs and typist jobs. The answer to that should be quite obvious:
1. too much regulation preventing new jobs from emerging to take advantage of those new opportunities created by cheaper goods;
2. old debt riding on the "horse cab driver" old income level has not yet been written off after that job is replaced by much lower automobile transportation cost; when that bad debt is transferred to the government, the burden of servicing that old debt is not only a form of tax on the old borrower (like any debt is) but also becomes a generalized tax on all productive members of the society, hence retarding economic activity.
Consumers buying substituting less expensive imports for higher priced domestic production spans two different categories:
a. the substitute is just as good as the original; in that case, it's just normal economic activity: economizing! So the consumers now have more resources left over to pursue other goods and services, creating new jobs.
b. the substitute is not as good, but the consumer has to make do with substandard goods. In that case, the consumers being forced into making that choice is actually reflective of a greater problem: when the government consumes 35% of GDP (between taxation and deficit spending), it literally outbids consumers in the market place 35% of the time! Every two consumers have to share what they would have had in the absence of the government with a government favored contractor sitting between them! It's like if two productive Americans had made two good sandwiches for their picnic, now a third person called G-man showed up to share their lunch, of course the original two would have less to eat. Being able to get a third sandwich from the vendor selling sandwiches out the back of a truck (i.e. "import" for the people sharing lunch), even if it is less well made than the two home-made sandwiches, is better than going hungry.
posted by 24.91.39...
, Wed, 9 Nov 2011 11:11:12
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