Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: Alberta's Child; Toddsterpatriot
With very few exceptions, the U.S. has always relied on cheap (sometimes coercive) labor to feed its standard of living....

I usually hear this type of rhetoric from Latino commies.   Do you really mean to say the American people are plundering the rest of the world?

110 posted on 07/11/2005 10:18:14 AM PDT by expat_panama
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 99 | View Replies ]


To: expat_panama
Do you really mean to say the American people are plundering the rest of the world?

No. But the fact remains that historically the U.S. economy has been strongest when we have been able to take advantage of huge disparities (either externally with other countries or right here in the U.S.) in standards of living between consumers and producers. That's been the case regardless of whether the "cheap labor" involved slaves in the South, Irish immigrants in the 19th century who worked in the coal mines of the Northeast, and Eastern European immigrants in the first half of the 20th century who filled our textile mills.

In fact, the presence of cheap Chinese labor on oil rigs in Colorado is really a case of history gone full circle. This country imported tens of thousands of "cheap labor" (in the form of Chinese immigrants!) in the last few decades of the 19th century to build the railroads across the western U.S.

115 posted on 07/11/2005 10:39:24 AM PDT by Alberta's Child (I ain't got a dime, but what I got is mine. I ain't rich, but Lord I'm free.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 110 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson