Governments should compete for residents, not businesses
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Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses
#2This is pretty silly because governments do compete for residents. Having jobs is a major part of attracting new residents unless you are a (sub)tropical paradise. A business that doesn’t employ anyone or consume any inputs from other state businesses is not going to be a particularly interesting business to incentivize.
Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses
#3This is pretty silly because governments do compete for residents. Having jobs is a major part of attracting new residents unless you are a (sub)tropical paradise. A business that doesn’t employ anyone or consume any inputs from other state businesses is not going to be a particularly interesting business to incentivize.
Maybe this is like a chicken and the egg problem? I see it in my country. Investors would like to come and build a factory, but there is no work force. So they go elsewhere.
Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses
#4This is pretty silly because governments do compete for residents. Having jobs is a major part of attracting new residents unless you are a (sub)tropical paradise. A business that doesn’t employ anyone or consume any inputs from other state businesses is not going to be a particularly interesting business to incentivize.
And a lot of issues in (sub)tropical paradises are also caused by lack of jobs, or at least ones well paying enough to afford housing in a market that’s valuable by virtue of being paradise.
Case in point, Honolulu has a cost of living on par with (or exceeding) New York, SF, etc, but with wages on par with an average mid sized midwestern city.
What this means is people who were born and raised on the island either live with parents or move to the mainland
Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses
#5This is pretty silly because governments do compete for residents. Having jobs is a major part of attracting new residents unless you are a (sub)tropical paradise. A business that doesn’t employ anyone or consume any inputs from other state businesses is not going to be a particularly interesting business to incentivize.
It's not just jobs, it's stuff like housing, government services - and then there's this phenomenon along the NY-PA state line, when New Yorkers sell up once their children are out of school and move to Pennsylvania. Local taxes are lower in PA, but schools are worse, too.
Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses
#6This line of thinking comes up often on HN but it ignores the central reason for governments to enact borders, a rather modern invention. Governments (at the behest of businesses) enforce borders so that labor cannot effectively organise. A border exists often for workers only, but is mostly a legal fiction that corporations can easily navigate.
The most common example for the Americans reading this is NAFTA, which makes workers in Detroit compete with workers in Mexico (suppressing wages in both location) while allowing the auto manufacturing companies to treat all of North America as one market. Toyota can move their plants around the region somewhat freely; can someone in Mexico freely move to the midwest?
Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses
#7This line of thinking comes up often on HN but it ignores the central reason for governments to enact borders, a rather modern invention. Governments (at the behest of businesses) enforce borders so that labor cannot effectively organise. A border exists often for workers only, but is mostly a legal fiction that corporations can easily navigate. The most common example for the Americans reading this is NAFTA, which m…
For a migratory species it is literally inhuman to erect a border. Borders should be jurisdictional boundaries but should be permeable like the states in the US. The rest of the tribalism BS is just that.
Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses
#8This is pretty silly because governments do compete for residents. Having jobs is a major part of attracting new residents unless you are a (sub)tropical paradise. A business that doesn’t employ anyone or consume any inputs from other state businesses is not going to be a particularly interesting business to incentivize.
When corporations are people, competing for businesses is literally the same thing as competing for people.
Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses
#9Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses
#10This line of thinking comes up often on HN but it ignores the central reason for governments to enact borders, a rather modern invention. Governments (at the behest of businesses) enforce borders so that labor cannot effectively organise. A border exists often for workers only, but is mostly a legal fiction that corporations can easily navigate. The most common example for the Americans reading this is NAFTA, which m…
> The most common example for the Americans reading this is NAFTA, which makes workers in Detroit compete with workers in Mexico (suppressing wages in both location)
I don’t understand how Supply side wage competition would be alleviated by allowing workers to move freely between countries. It seems like it could potentially make it worse for higher wage regions of the world?