[s73v3r]

"He could pay them $0/hr by not giving them the jobs."

I've always found that to be the absolute shittiest of rebuttals, given by those who have absolutely no point whatsoever. This person is not "giving" anyone a job; they are not being seeing a group of people and saying, "Hmmm, they look like they could use some work. I will create some and give it to them." No. This person needed some work done, and they were offering work. That's it. The person is not a "job creator"; those things don't exist.

"If you're American you can be proud you helped lift a country from the third world into the second."

And do we get to be proud of the complete and utter skull fucking the Chinese environment has taken as a result of that?

[jblow]

If you ever run a company you'll know that job creators exist.

I had a bunch of money. I could have kept it locked in a box somewhere. Instead I decided to pay a bunch of people to help make something cool. Yes, that's a transaction, but for my part, I didn't have to engage in it. (In fact some days I kind of regret it, given all the garbage one has to put up with when running a company.) I could have kept the money locked in a box and felt happy that I feel rich. Or something.

[dragonwriter]

A person who runs a company is no more a job creator than a consumer who pays for services is a job creator.

If "I have money, and I have a thing I am willing to exchange it for that requires someone else to do work" makes you a job creator, everyone who purchases anything in the economy is a job creator.

[facetube]

Or, to spin it just as hard the other way: a bunch of people gave up half of their waking hours for years in order to help make your something-cool business successful, and accepted your money in exchange for that assistance. They could have stayed home or done something else.

[s73v3r]

"If you ever run a company you'll know that job creators exist."

No they don't. There are people who want work done, and people who provide that work. That's it. You're not "creating jobs" simply because you feel like you want to create jobs. You have decided that getting the work done will benefit you more than not having it done. That's it.

[leot]

Environmental problems and abusive labor practices are problems and should not be tolerated. But they're nowhere close to accounting for the full discount in labor costs in China v.s. elsewhere.

Business owners factor costs into their strategies. They/we don't just have a bunch of jobs, and then go looking for people to fill them. China's cheap labor force has made possible products that wouldn't exist otherwise.

[chrischen]

The situation is much much simpler than you're making it. And as someone said, if you were part of a company that provided these jobs in a direct or indirect way, you'd see it much more clearly.

Basically there are people there that need to make a living wage to pay for food, medicine, education, etc. The reality is without the $X/hr jobs they have no other options or worse options.

An external actor like you, me, or a business can sit around talking about how shit it is, or go in and offer something at least slightly better. You're basically trashing the people who decide to take any action at all (giving them a low paying job). If the action isn't taken, they go back to their worse option. From your perspective you are failing to empathize with the Chinese because you don't see their other crappier options or can't imagine that they could possibly have crappier options.

[mistermann]

I would very much like to hear a somewhat detailed overview of how you think the "right" way to go about this is - and please don't use meaningless terms like "fair" instead of numbers, otherwise it's a total waste of your time.