The fact that technology has made manufacturing more productive is nothing new. We have had ongoing technology improvements in manufacturing productivity ever since we started making muskets in a factory with interchangeable parts in the 18th Century.
What is new is the closing since NAFTA and other global trade agreements of tens of thousands of factories in the United States and the opening of factories making those same goods in Third World labor countries like Mexico and China and yet being granted access to the US market.
The movement of much of the US industrial base to other countries under global trade agreements is not because of advances in technology.
What we are seeing with China and Mexico is not natural comparative advantage. It is purely labor and regulatory arbitrage under global trade agreements and the reason is it happening is because the US government has become the agent of the global-redistribution Left and of transnational businesses, and is no longer the agent of the American people.
Well stated.
“What we are seeing with China and Mexico is not natural comparative advantage. It is purely labor and regulatory arbitrage under global trade agreements and the reason is it happening is because the US government has become the agent of the global-redistribution Left and of transnational businesses, and is no longer the agent of the American people.”
That agrees with what economist Paul Craig Roberts has been saying for some time.
What we are seeing with China and Mexico is not natural comparative advantage. It is purely labor and regulatory arbitrage under global trade agreements and the reason is it happening is because the US government has become the agent of the global-redistribution Left and of transnational businesses, and is no longer the agent of the American people.