The White House is insisting that Donald Trump’s vision of Apple’s flagship iPhones being manufactured in the US will come to fruition, despite assertions from analysts and the company itself that it would not be possible.
The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters during Tuesday’s briefing that the president believed Apple’s recently announced $500bn investment, as well as increasing import costs sparked by his trade tariffs, would encourage the company to ramp up manufacturing in the US.
“He believes we have the labor, we have the workforce, we have the resources to do it. If Apple didn’t think the US could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change,” she said.
There are a lot of philosophical questions that this whole situation brings up. They’re not new questions, people have been pondering and theorizing for a long time on these matters, but I think they remain uncertain. What is the end result of wealth and economic development? Where does it end, where does it take a society, and the world?
The US was a manufacturing superpower. Those manufacturing jobs lifted a lot of people out of poverty and into the middle class. Average wealth and living standards increased significantly. Then things stagnated, and those manufacturing jobs moved to other countries where people were poorer and thus willing to accept lower wages than the American workers. The US transitioned from a manufacturing economy to a consumer economy.
The manufacturing jobs were replaced with service jobs. Now, instead of working in a factory you worked in a retail store, or a customer support center, or for a financial institution, or a software company, etc. All well and good, I suppose, but it was still stagnation for a lot of people. Many people stopped getting wealthier and their living standards stopped improving. Some people did get much, much wealthier, but many others actually started getting poorer.
So, where do we go from here? Trump thinks we just need to bring back the manufacturing jobs and that will fix everything, and he’s not alone. Many people, across the political spectrum, think that’s the solution. But, I don’t think it is. Don’t get me wrong, a good manufacturing job is a god send for someone who needs the work and for whom the job will improve their economic situation, but for the rest of us, and I think that’s most of us, it doesn’t mean much. So, what does? More desk jobs?
I think that once you reach a high enough level of economic development, your goals change. It’s no longer about getting out of poverty, it’s about something else: freedom. I think people ultimately want freedom. Freedom to pursue the things that bring them joy and fulfillment. But, how? Because people also want security and a decent standard of living. A hobo might be “free” in many ways, but he’s not free from poverty. So how can we be free, to pursue the things that bring us joy, while also having a good place to live and raise a family, in safe, clean neighborhoods, a good education, and healthcare, etc? How? Or, are those two things mutually exclusive? It seems to me, the only way you can have both freedom and security is to be independently wealthy, but that’s just not possible for everyone. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible for the majority of people. So, what? Where do we go from here?
How? By taxing the shit out of the wealthy.
There should be no billionaires. Period. If someone created something so insanely valuable that they actually earned a billion, then awesome for them. They can still have $999 million and be better off than 99.999% of the world. Most people who have over a billion got that money through screwing over people and exploitation. They don’t deserve to have more than a billion. Nobody needs more than a billion, and I can’t think of anyone who has actually earned it.
The next step is targeting the way wealthy people get wealthier. Tax assets instead above some number of millions instead of just income and capitol gains. Change the way corporate officers are paid and how boards of directors are made up of other corporate officers all voting for each other to get higher salaries. I’m not smart enough to come up with a way to attack the profits made by exploiting cheap labor in other markets, but maybe something like a global minimum wage that lifts up workers in other countries while not giving CEOs as much incentive to do it.
Finally, I would go after housing costs. I would ban corporations from owning single family housing and place a HUGE tax on individuals owning more than 3 homes (with moderate taxes on more than 1 home, then a higher tax on the 3rd home, then a ridiculous tax on the 4th). Limiting foreign ownership would also help out.
I haven’t heard this idea before and I really like it. You want to have your product manufactured by minimum wage workers in Cambodia? Sure, go ahead. But you’ll be paying them the minimum wage from your business’ home country, not theirs, and then paying shipping afterward to move your items to the sale location so it doesn’t actually benefit the business to abuse sweatshop labor rates.