So what you're saying is our elected representatives are sure to read it, understand it, and make sound policy from it.
800 pages of report go up, not down. But not all the way up.
It's a major geopolitical risk and they're sitting right on top of it. Like thinking a landmine only hurts enemy combatants and not children playing soccer.
The US is facing the realities caused by somewhere in the order of 50 years of incompetence in government at nearly every level. This isn’t going to change any time soon.
While we have been busy de-educating our new generations and worshiping idiots like Bernie and AOC, the Chinese worked hard and went from an agricultural society to the second economy in the world.
Well done!
A line from Star Wars comes to mind:
“Your focus determines your reality”
Here we are.
I believe Europe is in the same boat.
It's pretty funny to blame AOC and Bernie, neither who have controlled more than a portion of a state government, for China's rise in relative power over the last 50 years. Additionally what is the supposed enemy here? Leftist socialism, like China has?
They are emblematic of just how wrong things have gone in this country. We live in a time where our young are being indoctrinated into socialism and Marxism by our schools. These are philosophies that have caused until pain and suffering in nearly all corners of this world. We actively have people escaping various veins of these ideologies to come to the US. Once here, they can't comprehend how our young are being sold such nonsense. Pure indoctrination.
My own son was nearly forced to take a class on Marxism at one of the top tech schools in the US as a condition for graduation with an engineering degree. I say "nearly" because the way they did it was "soft". He had to take a humanity and the only class available for a year and a half was "Young Karl Marx". So, go to Marxism class or graduate a year and a half later. Disgusting.
Anyone who thinks these ideas are, in any way, good, has not lived under them. I have. Most of my family has. Friends have. Neighbors have. To call Socialism and Marxism "dangerous bullshit" is to be kind. The problem is the US has no clue what they are walking into. And so people like Bernie, AOC and others are idolized and supported instead of being laughed out of every possible corner of influence in this country.
The average high school graduate in the US is barely good enough to stack boxes in a warehouse or, maybe, make coffee. No financial education. No understanding of business. No marketable skills at all. That's what we are producing by the millions every year. Imagine what we could do if we graduated kids with solid financial, entrepreneurial, business and other chops. It would be absolutely amazing.
A class on Marxism is hardly a bad thing. Learn what it is, and what it is not. Judge it for ones-self. Restriction on education is what the communist regimes did, not the free world.
> Anyone who thinks these ideas are, in any way, good, has not lived under them. I have. Most of my family has. Friends have. Neighbors have. To call Socialism and Marxism "dangerous bullshit" is to be kind. The problem is the US has no clue what they are walking into. And so people like Bernie, AOC and others are idolized and supported instead of being laughed out of every possible corner of influence in this country.
The good news is that neither AOC nor Bernie Sanders are Marxists, they're Leftists. The difference is that human rights matter to them as opposed to what happened in the hardline Marxist/communist governments where ideology trumped humanity. There's no Leftist call for the destruction of non-Leftist art, non-Leftist science, non-Leftist political parties, or any of that. It's just another way of structuring taxes and social services.
> The average high school graduate in the US is barely good enough to stack boxes in a warehouse or, maybe, make coffee. No financial education. No understanding of business. No marketable skills at all. That's what we are producing by the millions every year. Imagine what we could do if we graduated kids with solid financial, entrepreneurial, business and other chops. It would be absolutely amazing.
The schools are still stuck in the model of making good little factory/office workers, it's true, but that's no more a fault of the Marxists than it is the Capitalists trying to keep labor cheap, although they've found outsourcing to countries with lower regard for human rights to be far superior.
Also, hoping for high-school graduates to have business acumen and marketable skills is pretty optimistic. I'd expect 18-25 to be the years where people develop those highly valuable skills; not everyone can be an entrepreneur and definitely not at 18. Maybe if we hit full automation we can start to expect high-school students to immediately start robotic businesses but realistically it takes a lot of years of practice to be good at business and finance.
A class on Marxism that distorts the reality of what it is and paints it as a good idea full of promise IS a bad thing. That's exactly what this class did. My son shared course materials with me.
> Learn what it is, and what it is not.
That is exactly what they did not do. The number of young people who actually think this shit is worth consideration is scary.
I see learning about Marxism exactly as I see learning about genocides. It is important to understand why it happened, how, and what and then understand just how horrible these things have been for humanity and why we never again want to repeat these mistakes. The equivalent of how they handle teaching Marxism in the US would be to speak of genocide as a good thing and have kids graduate believing that nonsense.
> Restriction on education is what the communist regimes did, not the free world.
Nobody is talking about restricting education. It's about telling the truth. The problem is in our educational institutions turning into ideological indoctrination machines. Seriously, the prevalence of socialist, leftist, Marxist thinking and teaching at our universities should make everyone take pause. A simple example of this is the violently militant culture at places like Berkeley, where they have, quite literally, violently prevented non-complying opinions to be voiced. That is not to say I agree with these views. I am simply saying that they are acting in a manner no different to the way you characterized communist regimes. Try to go to a university and have an open discussion about anything right of center and, today, you better have bodyguards. How isn't everyone horrified about this?
There's another element to this: What do we need more of for a prosperous future, young people educated on finance, entrepreneurship, business management, etc. or Marxism? Which of the two approaches improves society for all? I would much rather have students come out of schools and universities with both valuable knowledge and skills. Yes, teach history, don't lie about it, but focus on what actually matters and don't waste their time with nonsense. Forcing a class on Marxism as a graduation requirement for an engineering is criminal.
> neither AOC nor Bernie Sanders are Marxists, they're Leftists.
Probably not true at the core. They know --particularly AOC-- that if they come out with what they really think they will spook millions. They have to inch into their ideologies, shift the nation slowly. That's exactly how most atrocities happened in most parts of the world. You have to look back to where the ideologies come from. In AOC's case she was indoctrinated by our universities. That's how you can get a sense of what she thinks. Some of the stuff she says is so insanely out there it is impossible to understand how someone can think that way other than pure indoctrination.
> There's no Leftist call for the destruction of non-Leftist art, non-Leftist science, non-Leftist political parties, or any of that. It's just another way of structuring taxes and social services.
You are kidding, right? They have literally cancelled people and businesses and destroyed all manner of national historical monuments. They literally actively exclude non-leftists from university and business. I know people who, today, in the US, are afraid of voicing their opinion for fear of their lives, families and careers being destroyed. By the left. People are living in real fear of this truly evil phase of leftism in the US. American conservatives don't do anything of the sort.
> The schools are still stuck in the model of making good little factory/office workers
Not true. They graduate people devoid of marketable skills. And now we have to pay them $15 per hour, which they are not worth by a longshot (the inquiries for our robotic systems are going off the charts as companies are getting ready to eliminate people who are simply not worth this ridiculous hike in minimum wage).
Seriously, list what the average US high school graduate is good for and see what you come up with. The definition of this would be that they would be able to perform the work with no or minimal (a couple of weeks?) training.
Let me put it this way: The kids I mentored at the local robotics club came out 10 times more capable to add value to an organization than their peers.
I recognized this problem early on and made it a point to teach my kids useful skills. My oldest, about to graduate from university, left home with full intermediate level software development skills, knowing how to weld, manual and CNC machining, woodworking and more. On top of that, I devoted a few months to teaching him about finances, the stock market, showed him the value of not spending money on stupid things and the power of intelligent savings with equally careful and intelligent investment. He is graduating university having saved a large pile of cash from the well paying jobs he was able to get from day one (because he added real value). And, due to the financial education he got from me, he has savings and investments most adults would dream of having.
That's the power of an education that creates useful 18 year olds. It would be amazing if we adopted such concepts at a national level. And, no, not everyone needs to learn calculus or coding, that's stupid. My daughter has love for other things and that is what I am focusing on with her. Finding ways to ensure she comes out of high school with actual marketable skills someone would be willing to pay for.
> hoping for high-school graduates to have business acumen and marketable skills is pretty optimistic
I disagree. If I can do it with my kids the school system can do it with all kids. You have to have teachers who can teach that stuff, which also means we have to free the teaching profession from unions who do nothing to avance education (they advance union matters, not education).
This could be a good conversation over a cup of coffee. Look, I understand that fixing the world is a pointless pursuit, but one ought to be able to look at some of these things and call bullshit when warranted. I know I am a bit of a hard-liner when it comes to these issues. My grandparents survived a genocide and taught me values through their hard work and resilience. They worked very hard. They were useful to society. They did not bitch, complain, become victims, ask for handouts or equality of outcomes. They saw things that would make most people projectile vomit, and yet nobody would know it if they didn't open up about it. I want to be like them. I want my kids to be like them.
Sorry, a bit long.
You think? While UK was busy banning Huawei for spycraft, Macron was signing a partnership to install Huawei factories in France. I guess “when you can’t beat spies, invite them to your own territory and pay them”, or something like that, I don’t know I’m not a politician.
So he is doing exactly what China did - Making sure production is happening in his country, regardless of who nominally owns the factory. A step in the right direction.
I don't have any ill-feelings towards China other than some of their political and social proclivities. In the realm of business, they deserve full recognition and respect for what they have achieved. While the developed nations of the world got busy with nonsense and political infighting the Chinese quietly put one foot in front of the other, worked hard and lifted an agrarian economy to become the second economy of the world. Truly amazing.
The next couple of centuries will likely belong to China.
I can't think of a single thing anyone can do to affect change that took fifty years and an immense amount of hard work.
For one thing, people in Europe and the US would have to undergo a massive cultural shift. Entire nations would have to be more entrepreneurial and hard working than China. Politicians would have to actually do what's best for the people of their nations. Universities and schools would have to stop teaching bullshit ideologies and start producing capable and useful adults with financial and entrepreneurial chops (the average US high school graduate is basically only useful for stacking boxes at a warehouse and, maybe, making coffee).
These things are not going to happen. Or, put a different way: If, by some miracle, these things did happen, it would take at least 25 years to equalize the world. It would be a monumental effort most western societies are simply not capable of or not interested in embarking on...because, among other things, it will not be comfortable. And, BTW, that assumes China just sits there allowing the world to turn back the clock.
Sorry for the pessimism, but someone has yet to explain how we magically wake up one day and magically reverse a fifty year monumental effort by the Chinese people by teaching kids about Karl Marx and fighting about politics day and night. I can only imagine how stupid funny this must look from the Chinese perspective.
It is exactly people like Bernie and AOC who are likely to bring manufacturing back to the USA, instead of letting corporations continue to outsource every last job they can to save a dollar on labor.
The current predicament is the fault of capitalism and so called free trade agreements, which have greatly hurt global trade in goods in favor of financial fictions. Instead of US companies having to buy goods from foreign companies, they can just buy the factories and manufacture their own goods with foreign labor. Instead of a free international market for goods, this created a free international market for labor, and a global distributed planned economy, dominated by behemoths that at least nominally own much of their entire supply chain, across many countries.
This hurts workers (i.e. the majority of the population) in most countries, but it benefitted the rich investors, especially in the USA. Far from incompetent governance, this has been very competent in achieving the wrong goals. Capitalism working as advertised: prioritizing the needs of capital today over everything else: workers, national security, even capital tomorrow.
I have never thought of the analysis like that. Things like Ricardos law assume countries are independent agents intermediating with trade. it obviously that ... fascinating
Absolutely, 100%, without a doubt, wrong as can be. A complete and utter distortion of the realities that drive and have driven what has been an evolving landscape for decades.
At first, when we were making forks, plates and linen abroad, sure. This has not been the case for a very long time. I would say thirty years, if not forty.
What, then, is the reality of modern offshore manufacturing?
The most important thing the Chinese have done is to build a FULLY INTEGRATED AND SHORT SUPPLY PIPELINE. Period.
Next, they have a massive well-trained and capable technical workforce at every level. From assembly to technicians and engineers. While we were wasting time teaching our kids about Marxism they were educating technicians, engineers and scientists by the millions, as fast as they could. Many of them were educated in US and European universities and went on to spearhead industry efforts and education in China.
After that, once again, while we were indoctrinating our kids on the virtues of Socialism and Marxism, they turned their country into one of the most entrepreneurial forces on earth. The drive you see out of China to just "get shit down" has to be experienced to be believed. It's incredible.
I'll give you a simple example: Say I need to manufacture a part. I send out for quotes to 50 US-based companies and 50 Chinese companies (if I can even find 50 companies in the US). I will likely have more than 50 quotes from the Chines companies OVERNIGHT! More than 50 because some factories will likely connect you with others. The US-based companies? You are lucky if you get five quotes in four weeks. It's that bad. Actually, it's worse than that.
There are other factors, of course. Cost of labor is likely almost dead last in the list of advantages they have.
Why is the supply chain so important? Why are brains so important?
Well, you saw it during this pandemic. The US could not make fucking N95 masks to, quite literally, save our lives. Why? Because we don't even make the cloth, elastic, thread and machines here. Everything is in China. And so, even if money was not important we could not make masks. Such a simple product and we simply could not make them. Still can't, not at scale.
Say you want to make a relatively simple electronic device. Let's assume labor costs you zero in the US due to some amazing automation. You still can't compete with China.
Why?
Because the supply chain isn't here. It's in China. Which means every chip, wire, resistor, screw, sensor, piece of plastic, paper, packaging, box, manufacturing tools and equipment, test equipment, molds, etc. will have to come from China. Which, in turn, means your cost basis increased significantly. If you insist on doing a few things here (like molds and CNC machined parts) you will pay through your teeth, because our wages, taxes, regulatory and other factors cost too much.
This is where the whole discussion about minimum wage starts to come in. If you are forced to pay someone a minimum of $15 per hour, pack it up and ship the work to China, because, whether you know it or not, your business is dead.
In China there are towns that have evolved in order to optimize for certain product classes. Want to make microwave ovens and refrigerators? There's a town where your entire supply chain is within a one hour truck ride from your factory. The same business in the US would have to wait WEEKS TO MONTHS for parts and the supply lines would be nowhere near wherever they might care to locate within the US. Not any more.
I realize that most people are not in manufacturing and simply don't have a clue. I get it. It is too easy to reduce reality to a single variable (labor) and ignore the fact that nothing in life is driven by a single variable. In fact, there are dozens, hundreds of variables that drive different realities.
Companies don't offshore because they are greedy. They offshore because, if they don't, they cease to exist. We have reached a moment in time where, but for a few select market segments, the options have been reduced to one: China.
The fact that our kids don't leave high school and college with a solid financial and entrepreneurial education predicts our future. What we are doing to our kids in our educational institutions (K-12-University) is simply criminal.
You're completely ignoring the base reason: why did China do this and the US didn't? Because it was cheaper for US companies to invest nothing and move production to China instead of doing it in the US. Because the US government, unlike the Chinese one, is not allowed to directly invest and create these sorts of supply chains itself, because companies start complaining (read: lobbying against it) that it's out competing them (muh free market!).
In fact, the US did have all of this. After the war, US manufacturing was second to none in the world, and no one except maybe the USSR came even close. But US workers are expensive: cost of living is high, workers demand a work/life balance, regulations don't allow you to risk them losing hands for a slightly faster product.
Along came China, which had far too many people to know what to do with. Cost of living was low, they were more than willing to force people to work as long as necessary, and if they collapse from exhaustion or lose a hand here and there, no problem, there's a billion more who can take their place. And so, even while they were still learning and had little know-how, it was so much cheaper to offshore things to China than to manufacture them locally, even with much worse yields and QA at that time, that companies started moving in droves.
Now, if the US had not been run by capitalists, the US government could have easily stopped this. They could have eaisly prevented this from happening by disallowing companies to buy these factories abroad, or they could have bought and run any local factories that were getting shut down, and out-competed many companies on quality and branding.
Instead, the US government, run by and for corporations, embraced this whole-heartedly, creating international treaties to facilitate the flight of manufacturing from the US, sometimes even enforcing cheap labor availability if countries tried getting out of line with pesky workers rights that would cut into US corporation bottom lines
One thing they didn't count on though was that China did not intend to simply become a US colony, providing cheap labor to fuel US profits. They used this as an engine for their economy, investing in education and ever more efficient production as you pout out. Crucially, they also completely disregarded international IP laws designed to allow US companies to produce high-tech goods in other countries while not giving up the know-how. Instead, the Chinese government essentially applied an IP tax for all of this production and used the accumulated IP to start competing with the US on end products, not just manufacturing.
Now, this is becoming unacceptable, since they are starting to actually eat into those profits, and even more frighteningly, to come up with their own technology that rivals US efforts. This is the culmination of the Chinese plan, and the side effect of US profit seeking and short-term thinking.
Fortunately, this is starting to align US external policy goals more with US workers, even if US companies would still rather benefit from Chinese manufacturing. This will probably mean renewed investment in US manufacturing, incentives for US-built goods, and a resurrection of US engineering culture. But it may also mean a weakening of worker's rights if unions are not careful.
So yes, you are right about the current state of Chinese manufacturing and their advantages, but you are completely ignoring US capitalists role in how we got from Mao to here. Your weird tangent about teaching children marxism or socialism in the most economically right-wing country on earth, I will just ignore.
Yes, because the USSR did it right. You know, since capitalism is at fault...
I don't know if you were educated and live in the US or not. This "capitalism is evil" meme is yet another reduction of the realities of the world to a single variable. And it is simply silly. Sorry.
I look around my home, desk, driveway, even what I am wearing and the medicine I take and NONE of it would have existed without capitalism. In fact, China would still be an agrarian society without capitalism.
Please stop reducing reality from the complex multivariate problem it actually is to a single variable. "Capitalism = Bad" is a truly lousy explanation of how the world works.
As I said before, I have been in manufacturing for decades, nearly four decades actually. I have gone from being able to make just about anything I wanted in the US to only being able to make a small subset of non-trivial products in the US. And NONE OF IT has to do with capitalism.
Capitalism isn't the cause of these problems. It's a complex game of chess involving many variables, where wages represent one lower-level variable in the equation. If wages were the single variable that could fix this we could automate the heck out of everything and regain supremacy. Sadly, as I said before, and I will say it again, reality responds to dozens of variables and wages, as it turns out to be, while important, are not the cause of our (and Europe's) current predicaments.
Not sure how else to say it: We are at a moment in time when we, quite literally, simply cannot manufacture hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of basic materials, components and products in the US and Europe. The entire supply chain is in China. Period. Which means that anyone wanting to manufacture anything that doesn't fall under certain categories (like ITAR) has no choice but to go make whatever they make in China. Capitalism has nothing to do with it. They are more capitalistic than almost any nation in the world.
Why it happened is also a multivariate problem. Two of those variables are bad policies and mismanagement on the part of our politicians and the initial allure of cost reductions (of which, yes, 50 years ago, wages were an important factor). Once the chain reaction started the end result was almost inevitable.
Say you, me and one other person manufactured drinking glasses in the US or Europe back 50 years ago. We each have about 1/3 of the market for drinking glasses.
I decide I am going to be smart, manufacture my glasses in China, drop the prices and grab half the market for myself. I quietly make that move and show up in the market with glasses for 25% less. You and the other competitor drop your profit margins, optimize like hell and do your best to keep manufacturing your products in the US and Europe to compete with me.
You can't. You realize your choices have narrowed to two: Go to China or shut the doors.
You go to China.
Now you match my pricing and regain some market share. Eventually the third participant is forced to do exactly the same thing.
We have now all moved our manufacturing to China, dropped our prices, reduced our net profits and go back to a 1/3 share of the market each. Except, in doing this we lost our ability to manufacture locally. We also likely killed-off local suppliers of some of the items, tools, systems and services we employed at our factories. And, of course, thousands of people lost their jobs.
Ten years pass and our Chinese suppliers --having learned to make our products-- are now private labelling the same products to dozens of companies around the world. We go from having 1/3 market share to 1/10 and some of us simply go out of business.
Another ten years go by and the Chinese manufacturers come directly into our markets and sell the products they now manufacture exquisitely at even lower prices. Places like Walmart make deals with them to private label direct to consumers and bypass the "manufacturer" middle-men. We are now out of business, with, perhaps, only a couple remaining, who undoubtedly private label from the same manufacturers and become marketing brands --far removed from their manufacturing origins.
As this continues, industry after industry, baseline suppliers of raw components disappear. Very soon you can't even buy screws and wires made in the US and Europe, much less chips, displays, cloth, tools and machinery.
This is how we get to a situation where, in a pandemic, we can't make masks because we don't own the supply chain or the equipment suppliers. We can't even make the thread and the cloth we need to make masks.
This last part is what highlights that wages or capitalism are not the problem at all. You could have thrown billions of dollars at the problem (maybe they did, don't know) and you still would not be able to manufacture N95 masks at scale for probably a year or more.
Ventilators? Forget it. The whole thing was a sad joke. If that didn't teach everyone just how wrong we've been and how badly we mismanaged our industrial base, I don't know what will.
The one example I like to use about political mismanagement is the treaty signed in the late 1800's that effectively gives China free or nearly free shipping across the US. It costs me more to ship something from Los Angeles to New York than it costs a Chinese company to get a product from Beijing to New York.
That is insane. Even if I could manufacture the exact same product at the exact same cost (which is impossible given supply chain realities) I would lose on shipping. My Chinese competitors would be able to offer free shipping anywhere in the US. I would have to take a loss on every sale to be able to match that.
One treaty did that. And our politicians have done nothing about it for 150 years. Nothing to do with capitalism. Everything to do with incompetence and mismanagement.
Please, don't misunderstand, I get it, people who are not in manufacturing are not equipped to understand these realities. It's like trying to understand how a bird feels while flying without being a bird. A bit of an extreme analogy but the idea is what counts. There's a reason for which my favorite saying, attributed to Mark Twain, is: "A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way". It's true.
You can either accept what I am saying, go do some digging and understand it, or reject it. The sad part is that this will not change reality.
The same thing might have happened with IT and India and Easter Europe, except that IT people are easy to move around and the actual IT drivers have been careful to move the main talent back to the US, even while outsourcing huge amounts of work to those places (I am a Romanian programmer working for an American company). Also, the US has been effective in Eastern Europe (and I believe in India as well) in doing what it couldn't do in China: it has retained all of its IP while doing this, at least for now. Even while Eastern Europe and India have more programmers than the US and EU combined, there are basically 0 software companies creating their own products in these places. When our government needs an OS, it buys Windows from MS. When it needs city planning software, it pays most of the money to Oracle to build a system on it. People are buying games made by French or American companies, quite likely with local programmers.
And one of the major reasons for which the India and Eastern Europe have not been able to profit from IT the way China has from manufacturing is that India and Eastern Europe have bought much more into capitalist ideals. Speaking from mine and my parents' experience in Romania, the joy with which we the Russian and later Chinese-inspired "socialist" dictatorship's end was celebrated was hard to imagine. The hopes for a brighter capitalist future like we'd only seen in brief trips and old movies were high. Everyone was excited about the prospect of private investors taking old, inefficient communist-era factories and running them with modern equipment and modern management practices - Privatization was the word of the day. The state, under IMF and World Bank and US guidance, was to quickly get out of the way, institute free market policies, and watch the money pour in.
The actual result was that corrupt politicians sold those factories to corrupt investors for negligible amounts, investment in modernizing factories was negligible, they were quickly out-competed on the free market by cheap goods from China and Turkey, and were soon closed down and most people laid off. Just like in the US, countries that had had engineers, production line designers, chemists and so on; and manufacturing capacity that had been able to at least half-supply the country with half-decent (only half, mind you) goods locally became entirely dependent on imports. Any strategic and long-term goals for having these industries preserved were sacrificed on the altar of free markets and private rights.
And I do agree: attributing all of these problems entirely to Capitalism is too simplistic - there are other factors, such as globalization, corruption, the culture war which has become a major motivation for many people beyond anything else, demographic shifts and so on. However, the basic problem of the rich controlling the entire economy and putting their own profits before almost any other consideration is a major driver of all of these problems, and a major driver of their continued existence.
For example, you complain that the US was unable to produce N95 masks for the pandemic, and you are absolutely right. But do you believe that the people who designed the policies that led to this situation are surprised? Do you believe the companies that moved their textile and other production to China regretted it when they saw they couldn't produce these masks? Do you think they would choose differently today, had they known?
Even the pandemic itself has only really affected working people. Stocks have been booming, CEOs quickly moved to work from home, they were comfortable in knowing they will be able to afford any medical expenses needed to care for them, they had access to any PPE they required, and had plenty of room to have any kind of private parties they wished to assume the risks for. I don't believe that we will see any major shifts from the top because of Covid19: the system worked perfectly for those for which it was designed.
And yes, policy blunders like the 1800s treaty you mention do happen, and the political gridlock in the USA is unlikely to fix it any time soon. I'm not even sure it was so much of a blunder since, until relatively recently, most of the shipping from China to the US was actually from US companies' factories to US companies' warehouses or more complex factories. Now as Huawei and Alibaba and myriad others are starting to sell their wares directly to US consumers and competing with Apple or Amazon, the act is becoming far more troublesome. But I would not be surprised to hear that there are major lobbyists for other industries explaining how much money they would lose if shipping from China becomes more expensive.
And to be clear, the USSR or China are not socialist by any stretch of the imagination, even less so than being democratic. The USSR and its many sattellites were state capitalist systems, with the exact same profit motives as any capitalist system, just working for the dictator class on top instead of the more vague class of investors, and of course with even more direct control of the population and resources than a democratic capitalist society. China is a more complex mix between state and free trade capitalism, with all of its enclaves where private property is supported.
> my parents' experience in Romania > The actual result was that corrupt politicians sold those factories to corrupt investor
One of my neighbors is from Romania. I've had many very interesting conversations with her. She can't comprehend how it is that US youth are so in love with socialism and, some, Marxism. She says the same thing every time "if they only knew".
Another neighbor was from Czechoslovakia. Sadly passed away a number of years ago. I have a huge collection of old European and Eastern European stamps because of him. We also had lots of interesting conversations about life in the old country. Same kind of reaction to what has been evolving with US youth, disbelief.
A few friends are from a couple of former USSR republics. Once again, they say the equivalent of "if they only knew" and "we came here to escape what US kids and politicians are asking for".
My family travelled and lived extensively through Latin America, including living in Argentina before, during and after the military regime.
The problems you are talking about are not due to capitalism. They have to do with deeply entrenched cultures of corruption. Once they become "democratic" it takes decades, perhaps a generation or two, for people and politicians to think and behave as those in mature western democracies. I mean, in the USSR people had to cheat, lie and steal to live. As they migrated to other nations it was very common to see enclaves of ex-USSR residents continue to game the system and take advantage of everything, just as they had to back home. One of the most commonly known problems in the US was entire families taking advantage of our welfare system, even going as far as not declaring when family members died in order to continue to receive payments. They also worked for cash in order to appear unemployed and keep their benefits.
I go back to the same thing: Not a single variable problem.
Yes, capitalism has problems, nothing is perfect. We do need controls and rules in certain domains. While not perfect, we tend to do OK over time.
At some level it is very simple: Make a list of nations that elevated the standard of living of their population and how they did it. Create columns for any category you can think of: Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Dictatorship, etc. Now give us a list of nations that succeeded without capitalism. You can't. Capitalism has, quite literally, elevated billions of people from dirt-poor agrarian societies to the point of almost everyone in the US being able to walk around with a smart phone, have a smart TV, etc., etc., etc.. The first step is to be truly honest about what we are talking about. Nobody has found any alternatives that work better. Maybe one day someone will.
And so yes, to people like my parents the very word brings to mind images of their experience in the 'Socialist Republic of Romania', and of professors and newspapers trying to sell them on how good it was.
They know far less of the history of socialist worker's unions that fought and won for the right to the 40 hour work week or for the right to strike and protest.
Related to examples of successful socialist states, I can't give any. However, rather than debating the reasons for that, I will say that worker's cooperatives are a proven business model all over the world, so I don't see why it's impossible to imagine a successful economy based on co-ops instead of corporation. After all, at one point there were no successful modern democracies or capitalist states in the world, and the very idea seemed preposterous to many lovers of king and country.
Anyway, I want to say that I have greatly enjoyed this thread of conversation!
Yeah, in fact Bernie speaks to this exactly in 2003, in a discussion with Alan Greenspan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJaW32ZTyKE
Simple example: Did you know the US and Europe have a treaty with China (and other nations) that was signed in 1874 (yes nearly 150 years ago!) that gives China FREE SHIPPING WITHIN THE US?
As a manufacturer, it is actually more expensive to ship something from Los Angeles to New York than from China to anywhere in the US. Why? This treaty subsidizes shipping from China. American tax payers pick-up the bill. US manufacturers can't even compete.
Why was this gift granted? Because back then the intent was to help developing nations. China is now the second largest economy in the world and US taxpayer are still subsidizing every single postal package shipped from China today.
This is but one of the atrocities committed by our incompetent politicians that have caused US industry to steadily lose the ability to compete. This has nothing whatsoever to do with greedy capitalism, that's preposterous.
As usual, people think they know how things work because they reduce reality to a single variable problem. I have been in manufacturing for decades. I can't even count how many variables drive reality, but I can tell you it isn't as simple as casual observers like to think. The usual "greedy corporations" trope is the first thing that reveals someone not having clue. And, to be fair, sometimes the only way to understand it is to be in it up to your neck. Or to listen to those who have first hand experience. That does not include college professors and politicians who have never built anything in their entire lives. Sorry.