From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Tue Jun 10 2003 - 17:59:45 MDT
Rafal opined:
<<The "new" foreign workers buy American grain, movies, machines, American debt, weapons. A huge part of American export is dependent on the demand created by increased affluence abroad, due in part to globalization. Conversely, even poor (especially poor) Americans benefit from cheap but high quality imported goods. You don't need to have a high-paying job to shop at K-mart, and without K-mart you would be so much poorer, even with the same relative amount of cash on hand.
Rafal, foreign workers who make 1/10th the amount ceded to American workers, may do well for themselves in their own country, but they cannot afford to buy American cars, American steel, Anerican-made chips, American financial services. It costs too damn much and they would be insane to improverish themselves. Very few Indians, for example, can afford to buy an American Pontiac Sunfire (should they desire it) because it would be the price of 7 years income for them.
<<You can look at from a short-term point of view, or a long-term point of view. In the former case, you try to maximize return over 1, 5 or 15 years. Then it pays to keep knowledge controlled and tied to a place, to buy cheap raw materials abroad, and sell your knowledge-enhanced products at a premium, to buy more cheap raw materials. It pays to exclude competitors rather than to improve your own abilities, so you can keep consuming more. In the short term. In the long term however, 50 or 500 years, you want to maximize growth, even at the cost of reducing immediate consumptio..>
Wow, Rafal! Well, as John Maynard Keynes, onnce quipped: " In the long -run, we're all dead.." Highly un-Extropian of me, I realize. But I believe that avoids dealing with this critical issue. In 500 years humanity evolves into a successor species and downloads all those posts everyone throws back abnd forth and finds everything laughable.
<<...Since globalization of the economy increases the effective amount of resources available for enlarging our knowledge, allows uniform increase in production capacity, and a uniform increase in demand across the whole world, including long-term demand for American goods, globalization is the
long-term favorite over narrow, parochial approaches, like mercantilism, and protectionism. This is why globalization is good for the American consumer, as well as the European, African or Asian consumer.>>
Rafal, in the Great, Somewhen, when people are willing to make intelligent compromises, and are democratic capitalists, and cease the zero-sum games, and quit arguing over who is the best singer of all time; Sinatra or Der Bingle, a rationalization of the planets resources is possible.
Until then, degrading the American middle classes ability to purchase goods from around the world, by exporting their jobs is not a wise move. Without a decent short-term, we will not in any fashion have a long term.
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