[onion2k]

The alternative to Chinese goods is not locally made goods for the majority of people. It's either Chinese goods that we pretend are locally made, or it's nothing because they can't afford the local stuff.

Cheap good for decades has meant companies have been able to depress wages to the point no one can really live without them. Removing the cheap goods without also giving up massive corporate profits would just mean most people collapse into poverty.

[dmix]

Nobody wants to do the hard work of developing industry, reducing cost of living and doing business so workers are more competitive, and changing all the rules that make China 10x more attractive for this sort of thing.

They just want to ban even more things.

[YokoZar]

If companies have been "depressing wages for decades" how come they're at an all time high? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

People make stuff like this abroad because wages are too high here to make a profit, not too low.

[tancop]

real wages in western countries are down because 1. regressive inflation on essential goods like energy is faster than both wages and luxury goods and 2. rent and house prices (= mortgage costs) are up because of corporate lobbying and rich nimby homeowners.

that means if employers want to pay workers fairly they need to pay a lot more than in other countries with a cheaper economy. but even the inflated wages are not growing fast enough to catch up with cost of living. so yeah wages are too high compared to the rest of the world but also too low relative to the gdp and growth rate and corporate profits.

[AnthonyMouse]

> that means if employers want to pay workers fairly they need to pay a lot more than in other countries with a cheaper economy.

"Pay workers fairly" isn't something that companies in a competitive market can choose whether to do. If labor costs are high, they can either pay them, move operations to somewhere else, or stop operating. If labor costs are low, paying more than that would cause them to have higher prices than competitors.

What this implies is that countries with e.g. inflated housing costs will see operations to move to other countries whenever that's feasible, and indeed this is what we see. This isn't companies choosing to do this -- different companies will do different things, but then the ones doing the thing that requires them to have higher prices will be out-competed.

You can't fix that by admonishing them to "pay workers fairly", you can only fix it by increasing the domestic supply of housing and energy.