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longweekend58
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ImSpartacus2 wrote on Oct 17 th, 2014 at 6:52pm: longweekend58 wrote on Oct 17 th, 2014 at 6:05pm: ImSpartacus2 wrote on Oct 17 th, 2014 at 5:30pm: Laugh till you cry wrote on Oct 17 th, 2014 at 1:36pm: ImSpartacus2 wrote on Oct 17 th, 2014 at 12:28pm: Laugh till you cry wrote on Oct 17 th, 2014 at 12:00pm: Globalization and free trade is here to stay. Both bring benefits to the whole of mankind.
Australia's real problems are the boom and bust cycles that infect the economy and it is likely a bust is coming following the recent boom.
It is quite incredible how the economy has become dependent on the house construction industry. If that collapses the ponzi scheme economy will implode. I think your repetition of the mantra that free trade has been a benefit to mankind is just that; the repetition of a mantra without much thought. Indeed like all things, free trade has brought a mixture of good things and bad things but on balance I think its been more harmful then good. Overall the products that are produced are cheap, substandard, unreliable and shoddy and unnecessarily deplete our limited resources to produce goods with a ridiculously short life span fit only for the garbage tip, which in turn is destroying our environment. As to globalisation, I have no problem with it provided we have a genuine say in how it is managed, which we don't. Free trade with countries that pay their workforce slave labour wages under slave-like conditions necessarily means that our wages and work conditions must fall to those levels or our jobs will be lost. You're argument that free trade is here to stay does not counter what I have said. There is no reason why we can't manage trade in a way that our trade barriers only apply to imports that have been produced by slave labour and slave-like working conditions. As to your complaints about the boom bust cycle, well then you have a complaint with capitalism because that's how capitalism works. If you got a problem with it you gonna have to rethink that support. I recall that the car industry was supported by government benefits to the tune of $50,000 a year. That implies that if they paid third world wages and got no government subsidies they would still have been uncompetitive. Australia's competitive advantage is in manufacture of Map of Tassie Merkins and boomerangs. Quote:Reworking the figures, it turns out that Australia has subsidised the manufacturing of vehicles to an extraordinary extent -- $US1885 per vehicle, compared with Sweden ($US297), Germany ($US206) and the US ($US166). In other words, Australia has the highest rate of budgetary assistance of the seven first-world countries listed. So this puts paid to this argument. The Australian government as well as state government have bent over backwards to bribe the foreign multinationals to continue to produce cars in this country. We now know that Toyota Australia has received nearly $500 million in the past four years. Given that there are some 2500 Toyota employees, this works out at $50,000 a worker a year. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/lies-damn-lies-and-car-subsid... Not sure where that gets you. Just because cheap labour produces cheap cars at the end of the process line doesn't mean that they produced a quality product. Many great businesses producing great products have been priced out of the market by free trade and employers who will only pay the bare minimum in wages. Time and time again its been proved that when people have little or no disposable income they will invariably opt for the cheaper product but that doesnt mean that when you compare the products that the cheap product is more competitive in the true sense. If we want better, reliable products that will last and do the job and wont end up in the land fill in a few moths time we need to lose this idea that capitalism weeds out the worst and the weak. Quite the opposite. It only competes best on price and if people were paid the true value of the wealth they create they would buy quality over price any day of the week when you want to pay $100,000 for a base holden, $3000 for an auseie fridge and $15K for a flat screen TV mad here then come back and make your case. the point is that our high lifestyle comes at a cost and one of them is that manufacturing will be elsewhere. When you pay people a fair wage for the wealth they create they will gladly pay those prices because people only go cheap when they have little or no disposable income. When they have a fair wage in their pocket they will pay for quality and in an age of global warming, diminishing resources, overflowing land fills with brand new discarded capitalist junk, that's exactly what we need for the good of humanity, our planet and all the flora and fauna it supports. what garbage. RICH people largely buy according to price just as everyone else does. NO ONE will pay $3000 for the aussie made fridge compared to the $900 imported one. ANd the assumption that imports are crap is wrong too. Chinese goods are mainly junk, but Japanese and german are not.
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