@Thinkerbell That would be very un-patriotic from those manufacturers
And condeming your workforce (and fellow citizens) too compete with a nation where working conditions are either way worst, or life over there is cheaper and thus wages are cheaper, isn't really patriotic of you either.
@Thinkerbell Tax companies that relocate their production overseas in order to compensate with the margin of profit they make by relocating. They won't relocate anymore and you don't have to sacrifice our own worker rights to compete with those (not anymore so) emergent markets.
Perhaps it's better than becoming you the new China, don't you think?
@Thinkerbell Even Trump wanted to reverse the offshoring of jobs. And, in this country, workers' wage growth has fallen far behind their productivity increases. As a society we need to fix this and pay workers a living wage concomitant with their productivity.
Tax companies that relocate their production overseas in order to compensate with the margin of profit they make by relocating. They won't relocate anymore and you don't have to sacrifice our own worker rights to compete with those (not anymore so) emergent markets.
And what will we do when Chinese automakers (who already produce more cars than we do) start selling their cars in the US, as they already do in Europe? Stiff tariffs would be the only answer.
@Thinkerbell Yep, I remember the old "free trade" ideology; that gov't shouldn't have the job of picking business winners & losers.
President Reagan, in a 1988 Thanksgiving address, decried protectionism and said, “One of the key factors behind our nation’s great prosperity is the open trade policy that allows the American people to freely exchange goods and services with free people around the world.” Both Presidents Bush continued the embrace of free trade as an ideal, even as they oversaw policy exceptions.
Trump was very much a protectionist,
In its pursuit of protection for the steel sector, as but one prominent example, the Trump administration invoked Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows a president to block imports if he deems it necessary for national security. This immediately and inescapably put the Trump administration in the position of picking winners and losers in the U.S. economy. There are many more American workers in steel-using businesses than in steel-producing businesses, but the policy favored the latter over the former. Then, given the onerous nature of the policy, a system of product exclusions was set up, which required the Department of Commerce to begin judging, on a company-by-company basis, whether their requests to be spared taxes on their imports were legitimate. Further, when the steel program and other protectionist policies drew retaliation from foreign trading partners against U.S. farmers, the Trump administration responded with $12 billion of subsidies—and has announced plans for more. The protectionist approach expanded the role of the government in the economy and moved away from principles of limited, predictable governance.
And I think modern democrats can find industries they wish to protect as well.
@Thinkerbell Yes, I mean, you've replied to me with what I'm saying. America (and Europe) should go after the companies that relocate offshore (by taxing their imported goods), not destroy American (or European) worker rights in order to become competitive with third and second world job markets.
Ladies and gentlemen, do we have a first here: something Trump did that Elwood is not 100% against...? 🤔
And re Regan: “One of the key factors behind our nation’s great prosperity is the open trade policy that allows the American people to freely exchange goods and services with FREE [caps added] people around the world."
The Chinese people are not free, as I'm sure you've noticed.
"America (and Europe) should go after the companies that relocate offshore (by taxing their imported goods),"
But what about the Chinese companies that aren't American or European at all? I take it you would be for stiff tariffs that would discourage Chinese goods from being bought by consumers in the US or Europe.
I approved of Trump's promise to allocate a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure spending, and was deeply disappointed when he handed out a trillion dollar tax cut, mostly to rich people, instead.
I approved of Trump's promise to reduce deficit and eventually balance the budget; naturally he did the opposite.
I approved of his promise to reduce prices of prescription drugs; naturally he did nothing of the kind.
I approved of his promise to release his tax returns; naturally he did nothing of the kind.
I'd like to be able to say I approved of Trump's promise to replace Obamacare with something better and cheaper that covers everyone; but we all knew from the get-go that was a flat out lie.
@Thinkerbell In a philosophical sense, speech acts such as promises are very much actions that can alter the physical world.
For example, if I promised a young person that I would pay for their college, they might redouble their studying efforts and start applying to schools. Another example: if you tell your boss "I resign" that can cause numerous alterations in the physical world.
Here's a nice intro to the philosophy of ‘speech acts’ and ‘illocutionary force’ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/#ConForHowSayMakItSo
UPDATE: perhaps you can argue that Trump is such a well-known liar that nobody should believe his promises or alter their activities based on his speech acts. We knew that by 2020, but we did not know that in 2016 when he made many of these big promises.
Yes, yes, leave it to the philosophers to argue about every possible minutia of meaning in a given situation... that's why philosophers are still arguing over the same points they were arguing about 2000 years ago, and the arguments mostly hang on disagreements over definitions.
In your college example, for example, your action consists only in saying (or perhaps writing) the words promising to pay for the young person's college expenses. The effect this may have on the young person is manifested in the LATTER'S action of studying; in the meantime, you have done nothing except express words. When it comes time for you to ACT on your words, and you fail to pay up, we have an example of the well-known sayings "Actions speak louder than words," or "Promises, promises..." And of course, that is why we have written contracts, with enforceable penalties for not keeping your word.
Your "I resign" example is likewise not convincing; your words are simply describing your ACTION at that very moment, which may be further manifested by your walking out the door and never returning.
So of course, as any propagandist knows, words can have effects on the actions of OTHERS, but the words still remain mere words with regard to the speaker or writer of the words until he HIMSELF acts (or doesn't act) on them.
@Thinkerbell Actually, I came at it from the natural language processing side of things, and, unlike philosophy, NLP has had big effects in the world; first via machine translation and now more recently via Large Language Models.
Speech acts are actions; we know this because the affect the real world in large and dramatic ways. Perhaps the speech acts with the most ‘illocutionary force’ are those written in treaties. Those words sent 60 million to war 1914-1918 resulting in 9 million deaths.
And then there are the wars that don't happen because of the deterrent value of treaties. Sometimes a speech act in the form of a treaty is all that's required to prevent a war.
"Perhaps the speech acts with the most ‘illocutionary force’ are those written in treaties. Those words sent 60 million to war 1914-1918 resulting in 9 million deaths."
No, the words themselves didn't do anything of the kind. It was the ACTIONS of the countries involved that did so. They had a choice of whether or not to live up to the words in the treaties.
