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Comment by davidroberts | Hacker News Reader

More like each country had its own furniture making factories, but your point still stands. The ideal would be a society in which quality locally produced goods would be valued over trashy throwaway goods like those sold at Ikea, but this requires a complete rethinking of what's valuable in life by individuals and the society as a whole. Past experience has shown that attempts to manipulate this bureaucratically through tariffs, fixed pricing, closed guilds or the like just cause market distortions that bring about new problems without solving the old ones. In the meantime, though it's far from ideal, at least there is a way that hardworking people with no market for their labor can avoid starvation, although at a personal loss of dignity and a societal loss of that person's potential contribution.

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But what happens when Ikea sells goods of the same, or superior quality, than those "quality locally produced goods"? In fact, for many of the goods we buy, a lot of the "quality" we perceive from "locally-produced" is a figment of our imagination, or at least biased by taste.

Sure, the coffee table you paid $30 for at Wal-Mart is almost certainly inferior in every way but one (price!) to something you'd find yourself paying $400 (or $4000) for at [locally-produced furniture company]. But you could probably spend $200 and get something made in China or Vietnam that is just as good as anything you could buy locally-produced.

But you're missing an important point. "Quality locally produced goods" are very expensive. I can get a "trashy" piece of furniture from IKEA for just a few hundred bucks. That same piece of furniture, produced by a local artisan, would cost me thousands. Most people don't buy cheap furniture because they choose to, they do it because I have to.

As the population grows, more people buy more stuff. Local woodworkers and cabinet makers cannot possibly fulfill demand using locally sourced materials and hand tools. If everyone is to get chairs and tables and cabinets, production must be automated. Once automated, production can scale, which usually reduces both quality and cost. Instead of local wood, wood is imported and turned into particle board because its dimensions make automation easier. But now a nightstand can be turned out in less than an hour, where a traditional artisan might spend a week or more, driving up labor costs.

In other words, it isn't that people need to "rethink" what's valuable. They have already done the thinking, and they value more affordable, lower quality goods over limited, expensive ones. And I don't blame them.

I understand that market forces drive people's buying decisions. I also know there is nothing inherently better about "locally produced," except for lower shipping costs. I understand that hand-made stuff is available overseas from workers paid a fraction of what it would take to survive in Europe or the US, and therefore it's naturally more efficient to buy from them than make it here. There's no way any government or group can change this situation by fiat without causing huge other economic problems.

However, over the long term, the situation of a third-world craftsperson earning in a month the amount of money a minimum wage worker in Europe or the US makes in a day or two is just not going to last in the long run. Either the influx of money from foreign trade and investment will raise wages in places like Vietnam or China to where their physical labor is no cheaper than a first-world nation, or it will pay for automation that will displace laborers just like it has in Europe or the US, and the costs of production in those nations will depend less and less on unskilled labor.

A purely libertarian way of dealing with the problem this article brings up would be to tighten up disability or abolish it and eliminate minimum wage. That way those workers would have to compete against the global labor market to survive. That's not going to work because our society is not going to accept it, and things are so expensive here, they probably couldn't compete even with starvation level wages. I'm not saying the ideal is possible, I'm just trying to figure out if there is any way society can reap whatever contributions can come from people who are currently on disability for marginal reasons without the nuclear option of forcing them to complete against $80 a month wages overseas? It's no good for people to sit around and do nothing all day, either for the individual or society. Idle hands are the Devil's tools.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but maybe a government program? Since the government is paying for them anyway? Something like the old WPA in the US? I don't have much confidence that will work though. Realistically, government programs rarely accomplish their stated goals, and they rarely go away if they do.

Well, there's merit to the idea of a gov't program even if you're kinda sorta against it. As it is now, people are defaulting to a de facto living wage from a program designed for something else because their options are few to none. Something like WPA would allow us to address the problem of our country's infrastructure and put money in people's pockets in exchange for honest work, if nothing else.

It's completely unlikely anyway. We're barely hanging on to some of the existing meager social benefits in this political climate, let alone creating new benefits.

I think that many people in this situation would rather do honest work for their $13000 a year. So the government wouldn't lose anything by setting up a new WPA. And it might gain some new park trails or murals or some children being looked after while their parents worked. It would probably be worth it if the pay was $15000 a year, and there would be some incentive to get off disability. But the pay couldn't be more than minimum wage or else it would funnel people out of regular jobs.

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