artificially inflating the cost of living for the US consumer (through the cost of medicine, software, textbooks, food, clothing, etc),
Could you explain this in more detail?
Could you explain this in more detail?
Same goes for the international vs. the American market - there's no way you're going to be able to charge $150 for a textbook, $200 for a Windows license, or thousands a month for HIV meds in Africa and get any reasonable number of customers. Since the marginal cost of both is low, companies can cut their prices to close to the amount it costs them to make a unit and make it up on the massively increased volume.
Any time you segment a market like this you have to keep it apart somehow. Sometimes it's natural - a senior discount seems fair and few will make false claims of being elderly - but sometimes it's not. Clearly everyone in the US would prefer to pay 95% less for their medication than they are, but the pharmaceuticals wouldn't like it and probably wouldn't be able to survive on that. So they make it very difficult to do any kind of arbitrage.
If you're an individual you can probably get away with it with a lot of effort (I got a lot of Indian textbooks (Identical to US versions) because I was desperate and put a lot of work into finding someone who wouldn't refuse to ship to the US.) If you try to break the segmentation on any kind of scale you'll get a legal smackdown. Maybe it's completely legal, but it's hard to prove, and the possible losses are so great most companies will go to war over this.
I guess that the irony is that third-world wages are allowed to compete more often than third-world prices. Maybe there's something valid to that - if HIV meds cost everywhere what they cost in the cheapest country, then there would be no new ones, or at least an end to wildly cheaper versions - but that's the grievance.
(Don't know if third-world is the right term, so let me just say when I say that I mean "places significantly less economically developed than America")
Software and media is often charged at different discriminatory prices. DVD region codes point to this fact. You can buy identical gray market 'international edition' textbooks in English often at prices less than half of the US edition.
Clothing is often charged at many multiples of the real price it cost to produce, design and market. A market in Asia will show you how different it really is.
Etc
Prescription medications in other countries often cost far lower than in the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescription_drug_prices_in_the....
A coke in India costs half the price as it does in the US.
I would say the lower standard of living in a particular country puts the country in a good vantage position to export more goods (or services). For eg:- A person from a developing world might be in a good position(financially) when he decides to return to his home country for good, even if he has saved what an American would call "not much".
Now, I think true globalization which means (tariff free import and export of all goods including groceries) might eventually solve this problem. But before that happens- that might eventually mean a hard life for people currently living in the developed world.
One of the problems with downvoting new people - if they go negative, they're automatically hellbanned.