Apple’s longtime supplier accused of using forced labor in China

I would invite you to peruse my comment history (perhaps via the search functionality) if you really think I’m a shill for either Apple or the CCP. I would be even more outspoken about the issue were it not for the often-aggressive moderation of “nationalistic flame war” that I’ve seen on HN. But the truth is that none of our hands are clean given the complexity of global supply chains, the resource curse, and the apathetic attitude of the developed world towards human rights issues in general.

Ok, US manufacturing has nearly doubled in actual value since 1990.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

It doesn’t employ as many people, but that’s progress. Making more stuff with fewer people is the only way to grow wages over the long run.

The law of comparative advantage has remained an economic bedrock because none of the criticisms you cribbed from a web page have stood up outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances.

1. Producers always have a very good idea of their costs and where they are lower. Minor Exceptions don’t make a difference, a market doesn’t have to be perfectly efficient to be efficient.

2. Producers know transport costs, that’s a trivial calculation. Clearly CA works better the lower transportation costs are, and it’s harder the higher they are. But if you have free trade in gravel, it doesn’t rebut CA that gravel is frequently too cheap and heavy to transport, so while African gravel can be produced cheaper it’s not going to be shipped to America.

3. Monopolies and economies of scale just drive costs/pricing. Again it’s costs that drive CA, so not rebutting anything.

4. CA takes into account all costs, even such as tariffs. Protectionism is a way of eliminating the magical benefits of CA by increasing the costs of foreign goods and services to local levels or higher. So now the local economy is burdened with all the low value work that could have been cheaply exported, and has fewer resources for the most productive and valuable work.

1-7, really none of are coherent arguments against CA, it’s as if you don’t even understand how it works. An economic participant never needs perfect knowledge of costs, exchange rates, etc to enter into profitable transactions. For one example, interest and exchange rates are easy to hedge for relatively long periods. If you find a significantly cheaper assembler in China, hedging is just one of your costs, and if exchange rates move against you in such a huge amount that Chinese assembly becomes too expensive you simply move assembly when your hedges expire.

And 8) is just a rant about Guatemala. Whatever government runs Guatemala, the benefits of CA are available if it allows free trade. If Guatemalan workers can improve their living standards by taking on another countries low value work at a lower cost, both will benefit.

Then it wouldn’t be a good fit for an analogy regarding the externalities of globalism.

> Environmental controls can only be implemented at the national and international level.

False. Apple could have actually applied their own internal standards that they market, and shareholders could also have standards(lol).

>if the US bans Chinese batteries, it makes US made cars uncompetitive

You don’t say, this has been a tad condescending my dude. That said, aren’t batteries kind of an ironic choice given that Tesla built its gigafactory here? Which kinda illustrates what bugs me about the realities of globalism, most of the time regulations on industry predominantly increase start-up costs. Having dealt with both OSHA and the EPA extensively in the manufacturing sector, the marginal cost of compliance was typically low, but only once the process was set up.

>so it’s never free trade at fault, it’s lack of international cooperation on environmental policies.

I’m mostly with you here, I place a great deal of the blame on corrupt politicians in the West. But I disagree that it’s not the fault of free trade. Free trade is an animal and globalism is its handler. Globalism in the west has failed to rein in the beast that is the free market. Leaders pay plenty of lip service to the human cost of things and the environment. But as the dominant species on the planet we should be striving to prevent rising cultures from making the same mistakes that cultures who have already lifted themselves up made. Our planet can’t take us all following the same path.

I strongly believe and advocate that Western countries should band together and form a trade union based on occupational safety and environmental protection. Because until they do that, I see all of the liberal grandstanding about saving the environment and wanting things made safely as nothing but fraud. These departments do little but shift the damage somewhere else, and I care not at all where the person getting cancer from the mine is from, or who pours chemicals into the water. I care that it happens at all.

>your arguments are made disingenuously by labor unions.

Well I’m really not sure if it’s important that they make it disingenuously, but I will certainly agree that enforcing minimum wage in other countries is ridiculous. And I’m all for offshoring when it’s a good fit, but if a product is sold in a country it should be manufactured following the same environmental and occupational safety regulations as the country in which it is to be sold. I’m 100% for bringing up poorer countries, but we should be strongly disincentivizing avoiding automation in favor of loosely regulated human capital. I’ve watched many manufacturing businesses get killed in the US as a result of these sorts of regulations, and it’s horrifying to me. It’s super sad to see a US manufacturing sector business die from the proverbial straw, knowing that it will be replaced with a business in another country doing things considerably worse.

So I have a kind of rule about regulation that I also advocate.

If a regulation of a given industry creates a burden, then policy should be adopted to offset that burden either through trade policy(tariffs/duties,ideally as a block of developed nations) or through domestic policy(subsidies or grants to help bring them to compliance).

I disagree that only western countries should be advancing out of these jobs. Human kind as a whole should be advancing out of as many of them as we can, and many times we have the means to do so, but it’s cheaper just to be happy with our community advancing past these jobs.

This is a very interesting point. I'm not sure what to think of it. Maybe it needs a bit more complexity. After all the exploitation of disadvantaged minority owners is seen as hopefully almost universally bad, whereas using eminent domain to create a park/hospital/bus-stop/townhouse might be a good thing. Yet tyranny of the majority is also problem. (And of course it's hyperdimensional interlocking turtles in every direction philosophically.)

NIMBY-ism that happens in growing cities - so basically in all of them, since urbanization and migration to urban areas, and urban revival is going on - is seen as usually bad. Yet usually the problem is that any new development puts additional burden on the incumbents. (Eg. as population and population density grows there will be more people, more traffic, more big houses blocking out the sun, god forbid even more diversity too.) Which is a very similar in certain aspects. (A community trying to set themselves and their circumstances in stone. And we know people pretty much prefer stability.)

Land Value Tax comes up a lot to fight NIMBY-ism, but that's again a kind of tyranny of the majority. (If you have a small plot of land, let's say a garden, or a small grocery store in the middle of the city, LVT would probably force you to sell or develop it.)

However, at the same time we see that - for example in California - raising taxes on property is very much frowned upon. Sure, we know they have a very big financial interest in keeping housing prices going up and keeping taxes down.

...

So after all this rambling, probably what I'm trying to say is that the right to self-determination is important on many levels, but it naturally implies the conflict between those levels. Individual vs. group interests.