Tonight, as American athletes enter London’s Olympic Stadium, all eyes will be on China. More to the point, on the made-in-China uniforms Team USA is sporting.
Reports that Ralph Lauren Corp. (RL) outsourced production of the uniforms to China has U.S. lawmakers in a lather. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the outfits should be put in a pile and burned. A new bill, the “Team USA Made in America Act,” ensures athletes’ attire is more politically correct for the 2014 Winter Games, which fittingly will be in Russia.
This controversy is so contrived it hurts: It’s nothing more than a ready-made excuse to beat up on that economic bogeyman, China, which replaces the Soviet threat of old in a U.S. election year. Uniform-gate is just a preview of how ugly things may get and, frankly, pointless.
Really? Outsourcing is "pointless"?
Then why do companies do it? That's simple: They do it because there is no such thing as "free trade"; it is actually slavery and abuse of people "over there" that they're able to get away with.
What's amusing is that Bloomberg actually admits this later in the piece, if you read it all.
Yet it’s hypocrisy to blame China for the U.S.’s woes. Apple Inc. probably could assemble its iPhones and iPads within driving distance of headquarters in Cupertino, California, where it dreams up these gadgets. It makes them in Shenzhen sweatshops for reasons that have more to do with the U.S. economy than China’s. U.S. consumers want bargains; shareholders demand that Apple produce its goods as cheaply as possible; Americans insist on high-paying jobs, and U.S. laws prohibit China-level wages.
US laws also prohibit dumping toxic waste into the air and water instead of spending millions of dollars to properly dispose of that waste. "Sweatshops" cannot exist for long in a competitive market, because labor, if it is free to organize (as management is free to offer low wages) will evenutally strike and force balance to be restored.
It is only through the initiation of force that such conditions can exist. A free people will not work under these conditions; they will choose better. A free people will not permit the poisoning of their land and water, killing them and their children; they will demand proper environmental safeguards and put in place a government that prosecutes those who harm others.
It is only through lying and abject fraud that offshoring can exist like this in the US as well. Without salaries sufficient to purchase Apple's products there is no Apple. By offshoring the production to Chinese sweatshops, destroying the labor base here in the United States, Apple would be cutting its own throat but for the frauds ladled upon us by banks with the explicit cooperation of our Congress and its deficit spending -- yet another initiation of force!
It is often said that people borrow of their own free will but this is not always true. No lender intentionally makes losing loans in total. When you act in a way that appears to intntionally make money-losing loans and then force government to bail you out lest "armageddon" ensue there is no free will involved; you've imposed your loss on other people through the initiation of force.
When financial institutions are able to effectively counterfeit the national currency by issuing unbacked credit they force downward everyone's standard of living by destroying the purchasing power of the common man. These same institutions then offer "loans" so you can "afford" to buy that which has gone up in price. The price increased because the denominator increased in the form of excess credit, which the banks intentionally created. They know you ultimately can't pay when they make the loans, however, so they turn to government force by dumping those "loans" on the taxpayer (e.g. Fannie, Freddie, student loan programs now government-backed, etc) to evade the consequence (bankruptcy) of their willful behavior.
This is all initiation of force.
The particularly-galling part of it is that none of the political parties will stand and denounce these practices, demanding change. Not the Democrats or Republicans. This is to be expected, for they are in fact beholden to those very same banksters for their campaign contributions. Just look up your favorite on Open Secrets.
But what, then, is the excuse of the Libertarians? They cannot hide behind so-called "free markets" and "capitalism"; it is not capitalism when someone shoves a gun up your nose and demands your labor. It is not capitalism when someone evades the cost of production of goods by dumping poisons in your air and drinking water, literally sickening and killing the people. It is not capitalism when one intentionally makes bad loans and inflates the supply of currency and credit with the explicit knowledge that this will force prices higher to beyond the consumer's ability to pay, and then foists of the consequences of that behavior by force upon others through dumping it on the people via government.
This practice has risen to the level of public embarrassment. We are well beyond the point at which one can argue that so-called "globalism" is about anything other than initiation of force. As public anger over pollution and working conditions has risen in China (proof that the worker views these practices as initiation of force) the firm is looking to move facilities to Indonesia, much like locusts strip a field to the bare stalks and then move onward to the next.
More importantly from a political perspective, this is a "90+% issue." The only people who want to initiate force upon labor and people in other lands are those doing it, and they are few in number. The "90+%" here in this country are those who either have a job working for someone else or are a small business owner trying to compete here, not over there. Their interests are in mutual commerce, not initiation of force. They're making goods and providing services yet trying to compete with outright force and fraud on a global basis -- an increasingly-more-difficult task that is leading to more and more poverty and financial ruin.
Only a fool -- or a party beholden to the initiators of force and fraud -- would ignore this issue or worse, promote so-called "globalism" and "free trade" that is in fact nothing more than financial and environmental rape.
