>which means they had a significant amount of support within the US government
That totally explains why the USA never attacked Stalin, and in fact provided lots of logistical material from oil, rubber, and ammo, to tanks and airplanes.
It's been years since I read Eisenhower's biography, but my recollection is that within the military a lot of the aid to Russia was seen as a terrible idea and many felt that the British tricked the US into giving that aid in a secret three-way meeting in North Africa.
Nope, incorrect. Lend Lease was criticized that it wasn't really lending gear, since there was a high expectation that it wasn't coming back.
I don't know of any large scale thoughts that Britain tricked the US into entering initial aid attempts. The US was heavily into anti Axis attempts early in the war.
We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of ideology, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
>Which is, at a minimum, weird. Why would anybody want to do that (by decree, no less) is beyond me.
This is what governments and rulers have done since Mankind started building stuff.
You're fixating in the legal tecnicalities like a law or executive order, but it has always been like that.
Governments and rulers always set the style of public buildings.
The reason for that, is left as an exercise for the reader.
And the author could note the wide range of opinions these founders had.
Their wisdom isn't because they spoke in a unified voice, rather the opposite. Their disagreements make visible deeply thought out ways of framing and weighing political decisions.
Wisdom isn't "Use a monorepo" or "Use microservices". Wisdom is the debate between the two, allowing you to learn the strengths and pitfalls of each.
The thing is, it doesn't matter what the founding fathers have written (or not). If you have to appeal to a (supposed) authority, then you're probably talking BS.
The founding fathers were important historical figures, but they were also men of their time. Did anyone ever asked "What would George Washington say about electric cars?". No, because he wouldn't have a clue.
>"What would George Washington say about electric cars?"
That kind of silly comparison doesn't make any sense, and it's only a maneuver to skip any serious discussion when one is trapped without arguments.
But if you ask how should the Republic operate, what kind of values and vision its public building should represent, then the opinion of the Founders is definitely very relevant.
Your point still stands, however. To think that the wisdom of white male slave owners is somewhat unquestionable is so deeply flawed i can’t assume good intentions.
You question these people's wisdom because they are "white male slave owners".
Did you ever think that because they were confronted with the reality of slavery they were much much more attuned to the issues of human rights than say a tech worker in our society who doesn't notice that almost everything they use and touch was made by slaves? Who built that iphone? Sewed your clothes? Who mined the cobalt which allows your lithium batteries?
And even in the west, slave labor hasn't gone away. We just hide it in private prisons or "illegal" immigrants.
We are much better at tech than the founding fathers, but I have no evidence that we are any better at moral and/or political philosophy (and quite a bit of evidence against).
> because they were confronted with the reality of slavery they were much much more attuned to the issues of human rights than say a tech worker in our society
I don’t think there is much evidence for that.
> And even in the west, slave labor hasn't gone away. We just hide it in private prisons or "illegal" immigrants.
More than that, we have Capitalism, that allows poor people to compete against each other about where is the point where one is too poor to have a job.
>To think that the wisdom of white male slave owners is somewhat unquestionable is so deeply flawed i can’t assume good intentions.
I don't know where you from, but maybe the USA (or any other Western country), is just not for you.
Maybe you'd appreciate more the opposite end, something like Haiti, the product of the slaves who killed those evil white males you despise so much.
I think you are trying to argue the same point as I am, so I should be more supportive.
Hati was not the best choice for a comparison. It wasn't the slave revolt which turned Hati into a hell country. It was the French insisting that the now free slaves had to "repay" for what they had "stolen" (and for the French losses when they tried to invade and re-take the country); the massive debt burden imposed by the French and supported by the other world powers crippled the country's economy for well over 100 years.
That sound like really good excuses if multiple countries haven't also been destroyed by wars, had to pay billions in debt or any other things, and managed to reach a much more developed state. Yet the usual suspects can't reach the developed status, even with lots of foreign aid.
You don't even need to go that far. Compare Haiti to Dominican Republic.
But as someone once said "Demographics are Destiny".
So GW would not have had a clue about multiple types of users sharing a street? Like he never had to consider how people with different resources and needs might have to share a common utility?
And wouldn't have a clue about how such a group of people could come to a decision which sufficiently met the needs of all???
My friend, discussions of these topics goes back at least to the ancient greeks.
The third F is for "Fátima" (Our Lady of Fátima).
And besides the Football, it has nothing to do with Bread and Circus, as every people should cling to their Faith and customs.
Edit: This is present in your own links you didn't bother reading, and you'd see those "Three Fs" wasn't any Regime motto, but post 25 April propaganda, the official one was "Deus, Pátria e Família" (God, Fatherland, Family).
>I don't have any illusions we can shift mass manufacturing back to the US
Why do people insist that the thing that allowed the USA to become prosperous and go from a poor former colony of the British Empire to a world power wouldn't be feasible?
A big part of what has changed is that much of the innovation in manufacturing has shifted from the ability to mass produce things at all in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the US did very well at this) to cost optimization in the twenty-first century (China is doing very well at this).
I'd say that it's feasible to have mass manufacturing return to the US, but not a mass of manufacturing jobs in the short to medium term. Manufacturing with automation that is cheaper than the world's cheapest labor is feasible in the US. But, until the US standard of living converges with parts of the world that have large, organized sources of cheap labor (today that mostly means Asia), the cost of US labor will not allow competitive prices on manufactured goods.
There are partial exceptions to this. For example, it can make sense to do final assembly of cars in the US. This has many reasons... parts can be sourced from all over the world, there has long been investment in automation around auto assembly so the cost of labor is a smaller fraction of the consumer price, shipping cars across oceans is expensive, etc. Even in this example, far less US labor is used in the end to end production of a US assembled car than was the case decades ago.
I'm not an economist by any stretch of the imagination (I'd love to see a response from someone who is!). But I do work on math and software systems that manage a sizable marketplace with a goal of efficiently balancing competition between many businesses with competing interests. You can get a long way on this kind of thing by just thinking about the incentives that would be set up and how companies would rationally respond to those incentives.
If I understand your question... the tax would, for example, be paid by Apple on their products sold in the US if they continue to build their devices in China and it would be based on the difference in the cost of labor between the US and China. Let's assume the administrative details could be worked out, which does not seem trivial (e.g., If you want it proportional to the labor savings of manufacturing in China, how many hours of labor are spent on an iPhone and how is that audited? And how many hours would it take to make in the US with different worker protection laws / expectations?).
Apple would not just absorb such a tax. It would be reflected directly in the prices of their products. So prices go up for products sold in America, regardless of whether they are made in China (prices go up to cover the new tax) or they start being made in the US again (prices go up enough to cover more expensive labor).
Apple would now have the choice of continuing to manufacture in China or bringing manufacturing "home". They still want to sell to the rest of the world. To be competitive in the rest of the world, the non-US products still need to be made in China to keep prices down. So bringing US-bound production home means managing a more complex supply chain. I think I'd want to just pay the tax and keep logistics simpler by continuing to manufacture everything in China, even items bound for the US. One way around this would be for the government to charge US companies the tax for products sold outside the US as well. This would almost certainly be a disaster for the US because non-US companies now have a price advantage everywhere in the world except the US. Apple now has two choices... cede the global market to non-US competitors or move themselves outside the US.
So, if the result is that this doesn't help American labor much, then we're left with Americans paying higher prices for products with little offsetting increase in income. So Americans' purchasing power drops relative to the rest of the world. Revenue does increase for the US government and some of that will benefit the people who would have liked those manufacturing jobs, but certainly not all of it.
In the long term I can see the US getting more competitive in the global labor market because of such a tax, but not in a way that many would choose. It's not hard to see this dropping the standard of living in the US to some extent. If it drops enough that Americans are eager to work for the same compensation that Chinese workers get, manufacturing jobs could start coming back. Be careful what you wish for?
I wanted to follow up after giving sufficient time for other replies.
I sincerely hope you check your history and read this :-)
First off, thankyou for the in-depth response.
I, personally, think the race to the bottom style economics hurts everyone. It promotes a style of business that isn't healthy to employees, and allows companies to find loopholes to abuse Labor.
I completely agree about the downsides of the race to the bottom - I think it's inherently short sighted on a number of fronts (humane treatment of workers, wise use of natural resources, long term success, etc.). But I also see it as an almost inescapable consequence of US style capitalism. US capital markets reward companies who squeeze out every last penny and punish those who don't. Executives in public companies that are seen sacrificing short term revenue or short term profits for anything don't often keep their job for long. And those executives exploit this by making sure they have golden parachutes.
I think it goes way beyond race to the bottom. It's the effort to optimize the exploitation of everything for money. There is so much money to be made by exploiting every nuance of every law and regulation (or lack thereof), that I don't see companies pulling back willingly for any length of time. And the people who are already benefitting most from this have accumulated so much wealth and power that I don't think there's much hope of establishing laws or regulations that don't have exploitable loopholes designed in. I fear it will take something on the scale of the Great Depression to get meaningful change in this regard.
You'd have to turn the clock back, when we were industrializing Asia wasn't competing, shipping and communications were expensive, etc.
I've heard that for many mass products China can get things onto the shelf for less than US manufacturers would have to pay for raw materials. On that extreme end I just can't imagine us producing those items.
Of course it's a sliding scale, I pay a lot more for certain types of goods that are made close to where I live but it seems foolish to extend that approach to everything.
That totally explains why the USA never attacked Stalin, and in fact provided lots of logistical material from oil, rubber, and ammo, to tanks and airplanes.