re: Can dignity exist in a capitalist society?

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Ive asked her several times what it means to her and she cant answer.

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Question: Can dignity exist in a capitalist society?

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, neither could her prof.

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Not at all. White people in the Rust Belt losing lower-level manufacturing and failing to adapt to a changing society is exactly the target of this talking point.

That's been THE driving force of how to make America great again within the political messaging. That's why tariffs are sacred to MAGA.

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I would argue that consumers aren’t viewed in a human context.

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it can and does, far far far far more than is the case in any other social model. Tell it to your prof.

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Such as?

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Today, we have a widespread move for protection: pressures from the steel industry, I am sorry to say successful, to have the government take measures to restrict the imports of steel; so-called voluntary agreements to restrict the imports of TV sets from Japan, and of textiles from Hong Kong, Korea, and I know not where else; and of shoes from Italy. We have a growing pressure for quotas on imports of oil and of other products. We have widespread concern that somehow or other a weakening dollar, the decline in the price of the dollar in terms of the mark or in terms of the Swiss franc or the yen, that a weakening dollar in that respect, requires the government to impose restrictions on imports or to subsidize exports.

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While, on a superficial level, it's very easy to see why we have had tariffs and other restrictive measures such as the maritime subsidies, such as the recent import quotas, because producer interest is concentrated and consumer interest is diffused, that alone is not really a fully satisfactory answer. Let me take another example of exactly the same thing. Why have we had price supports of farm products to take up a subject of special interest here where there are special interests? (We're all of us special interests; it's only the other fellow who's a special interest.) Why have we had farm price supports? You will find it very hard to find any economists who will support farm price supports. This is another case in which the consumer is simply being protected against low prices. Why do we have them? Because the agricultural interest has been concentrated and the consumer interest diffused and widespread. Because you have a relatively small group of people who regard themselves as having much at stake and therefore they are able to be more effective politically than the diffused consumer interest.

We often think that this is a country in which we have a majority rule. That's true, it is a democracy. We do elect people to Congress. We do have majority rule. But it is a very special kind of majority. It's a majority that is formed by a coalition of minorities. If you want to get elected to Congress the way to do it is to find 3 percent of the people who will say to you, "If you vote for this, we'll vote for you whatever else you do." Then you find another 3 percent and another 3 percent, and you build up a 51 percent majority consisting of a coalition of special interests. And yet, that overstates the case. Because it's also true that special concentrated groups of that kind have never been able to get their way unless they could make a plausible case that it was in the general interest of the country as a whole to promote their special interest. The maritime interest could not have gotten their way unless they had been able to persuade at least a large fraction of the public that there was a genuine national security reason for maintaining a merchant marine. The agricultural interest, the farm price support proponents could never have gotten their way unless they had been able to establish a case that appeared plausible to a large fraction of the people that there was a national interest in preserving family farms or in some other aspect of agriculture.

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For example, public discourse tends to be carried out in terms of jobs as if a great objective was to create jobs. That's not our objective at all. There's no problem about creating jobs. You can create any number of jobs by having people dig holes and fill them up again. Do we want jobs like that? No. Jobs are a price; we have to work to live, whereas if you listen to the terminology you would think that we live to work. Some of us do. There are workaholics, as there are alcoholics, and some of us do live to work. But in the main what we want are not jobs; we want productive jobs. We want jobs which will enable us to produce the goods and services we consume at a minimum expenditure of effort. In a way, the appropriate national objective is to have the fewest possible jobs, that is to say, the least amount of work for the greatest amount of product.

In the international trade area, the language is almost always about how we must export and what's really good is an industry that produces exports. If we buy from abroad and import, that's bad. But surely that's just upside down as well. What we send abroad we can't eat, we can't wear, we can't use for our houses. The goods and services we send abroad are goods and services not available to us. On the other hand, the goods and services we import provide us with TV sets we can watch, with automobiles we can drive, with all sorts of nice things for us to use. The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is the cost of getting those imports. The proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible.

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Let me go at this a little more indirectly. You can see the fallacy in this argument I think most clearly by taking an extreme case. Let's take the most extreme case of all. Let's suppose that at the existing exchange rate, whatever it is, Japan, to take the example which is a favorite "whipping boy," could undersell us in everything, that the Japanese can produce whatever you name across the board from wheat and soybeans to television sets and automobiles more cheaply than we can. And let's see what would happen. We'd rush to buy them. The Japanese sellers would be paid for them in dollars. What would they do with the dollars? Nothing for them to buy in the United States, because by assumption everything is cheaper in Japan. What then would they do with the dollars?

If they would be willing to burn them up or to bury them in the Pacific Ocean, ah, that would be wonderful. After all, there is no product we can produce more cheaply than green pieces of paper. But of course, the Japanese are not going to do that. They are not going to work and produce goods and send them over here in order to get pieces of paper which they are going to burn up. They want to get goods and services and when they discover that there are no American goods and services that are cheaper than those in Japan, they will say, "Well, gee, I had better convert these dollars back into yen." But who is going to sell them yen? Why would anybody sell them yen? Because if I have yen I can buy the Japanese goods, by assumption, more cheaply, so nobody would be willing to sell yen.

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What about the argument of unfair competition? What about the argument that the Japanese dump their goods below cost? As a consumer, all I can say is the more dumping the better. If the Japanese government is so ill-advised as to tax its taxpayers in order to send to us, at below cost, TV sets and other things, why should we as a nation refuse reverse foreign aid?

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If you want better and cheaper cars, let the Chinese compete here. You'll find US innovation ramp up quickly.

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Our protections have caused companies to stop innovating

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