[fooker]

Your factory analogy is great because that's exactly how it happened and we outsourced everything to China.

It's significantly easier to outsource white collar work.

And you can keep playing the regulation game until there are no companies left.

[moshegramovsky]

Right but you act like nothing can be done about that. If you outsource enough then don't count on the US government to protect you overseas. Go ahead and risk nationalization. The very fact that we are having this discussion shows how bad the situation is: companies can effectively threaten to move all their jobs overseas, thereby threatening US workers with economic ruin. That's not okay.

The government grants broad liability shields to owners of companies because there is a vested state interest in facilitating commerce/economic growth. I guess if companies are just going to move overseas then maybe those liability shields could just be vacated. They don't deserve to have their cake and eat it too. It's easy: want the liability shield? Stop being fucking greedy and be a good corporate citizen. Otherwise, no cake for you.

[fooker]

That seems like a weird tangent.

If you give companies the ability to choose US government protection against their overseas operations being nationalized versus the ability to hire foreigners on work visas, the overwhelming majority of companies will choose the latter.

[mtlynch]

I don't understand what you're advocating.

Do you think it's a bad thing that the US implemented occupational safety laws?

I agree that it's not great that many of those risks just shifted overseas, but it's certainly a net positive that American employers can no longer let workers die or get permanently injured and just let the workers absorb those costs.

The H1B visa system isn't just a natural part of capitalism that I want the government to regulate. It's an artificial condition created by bad regulations. You can argue that we shouldn't have immigration restrictions at all since they're an artificial economic constraint, but that's a whole other argument.

[fooker]

I don't think it's specifically bad to have occupational safety laws, but overregulation in general has a choking effect.

By the time it'll take you to navigate the system to build anything physical in the US, you can have two iterations of the product in China.

The US way of handling this to go per incident and make one more rule, no matter how improbable that situation is. Eventually you end up with a system that needs a team of lawyers.