True, but in that case the important part is still buying from an American company, even if the product is wholly assembled elsewhere. I didn't mean to imply you can and will only buy American made products from start to finish. Even in the case of Apple you're supporting very high American wages and the products cost more. Some manufacturing/assembly has been moved to the US.
> The problem with wanting to do all the manufacturing at home is that not all manufacturing wages are the type of wages you'd want in a developed, high-income economy. Low-skilled, labor-intensive assembly work is not a foundation for continued prosperity in a developed, high-income economy. And Westerners (Americans) don't want all the bad stuff that typically comes with it, including the pollution.
I agree with you, though I think items like clothing can be made much more costly but higher quality and with local manufacturing (like in Europe for some companies) but if we go back to the original point it was about supporting "living wages".
My point was just that where American (or western depending on your own beliefs) companies exist and make a given products (a skillet/frying pan was just an example where I knew there were a few American manufacturers), and let's assume it's not fraud or rebranding or something, you should pay more for those products if you want to support "living wages". Otherwise you can buy "the thing from China [1]" but you can't do that and also support "living wages" because from an assembly/manufacturing worker perspective there is no wage to be had because they aren't doing the job. To your point also of course you can argue that the company that's HQ'd in the US, doing the design work, with manufacturing in China also receives a lot of the profits or can capture the majority of the value of the product, but those folks are already paid corporate wages which are higher than a "living wage".
I'd also mention I suppose that not everyone can just work in an office and have people in other countries work in assembly lines.
[1] China makes incredible stuff, I don't mean to imply everything made there is cheap or something along those lines, though of course many products that Americans are exposed to are of that nature, there's nothing necessarily wrong or immoral about it.
[–] ElProlactin 15 hours ago
[–] ericmay 14 hours ago
Well yea that's what will happen most likely. Obviously not all will come back and in what form it does will probably be different. But we don't have to focus only on Apple assembling computers since that's not the only company or industry at hand.
> The problem is that the average American earner cannot afford to pay what it would cost to produce consumer goods end-to-end in the US in a manner that would allow people engaged in low-skill labor to earn an American "living wage".
Well I think we can, we'd just have to buy fewer things but probably higher quality/more handmade/local, and then we'd have more people making more money. Personally I'm in favor of it just because I think it's a better way of life for many people (owning your own business, doing work yourself, &c.) But to your broad point, I don't disagree with you. I'm just saying this idea of a "living wage" is a farce unless Americans are willing to do what I believe you and I are both generally suggesting here. :)
[–] ElProlactin 7 hours ago
That's the antithesis of American consumer culture. Like I said, for a huge swath of Americans, even those who are lower middle class, a European lifestyle (which is still a developed, high-income lifestyle) would be seen as a step down.
So yes, you're right. The idea of a "living wage" is a farce because the American system is not really concerned with this even if politicians have to pretend to be. In reality, the US has maximized the economic ceiling at all costs. As long as people think they have a chance at becoming unfathomably wealthy, even huge numbers of the poor will vote for policies that perpetuate their own poverty.
The amount of assembly work done in the US is absolutely miniscule. This type of work is never coming back to the US in any meaningful volume unless it can be done by robots.
> ...you should pay more for those products if you want to support "living wages".
The problem is that the average American earner cannot afford to pay what it would cost to produce consumer goods end-to-end in the US in a manner that would allow people engaged in low-skill labor to earn an American "living wage".
Americans cannot have it both ways: you cannot consume more material goods than any other group in the world and produce those goods domestically using workers earning an American living wage.
Most Americans truly don't understand the scale of their consumption. Countries in Western Europe are developed, high-income nations and many Americans couldn't fathom living a Western European lifestyle because even most Western Europeans don't consume like Americans.