You ever heard the claim that rich people would just up and leave the country if you don’t pander to them? Who exactly are they going to sell their local assets to? lol.
The unironic answer is that it doesn’t matter. When capitol flight occurs, they can afford to lose their assets and just let them rot if the labor/tax savings are enough. That’s basically what happened with all of the outsourcing of labor to East Asia. That’s why we have a rust belt. The savings in labor costs were enough to justify letting these multi-million dollar factories sit and rot.
They weren’t left to rot. They moved the machinery lock, stock and barrel to China.
I used to know a guy who worked at a furniture factory in the Carolinas. (The Carolinas were once famous for furniture.) After Bill Clinton took the lead in admitting China to the WTO, he said they were selling at retail lower than his cost of production. So the company closed up the factory and moved the entire thing, including him, to China.
The machinery wasn’t left to rot. The workers were. And then they had a childish temper tantrum, and instead of retraining into 21st century high tech industries, they went and voted Trump into office.
On a case by case basis. In some cases the equipment was cheap enough to move, but in some cases it wasn’t so it was just scrapped or left to rot if it was too big to be cost effective to move.
Disagree with putting the blame on the workers for not retraining, though. Their entire way of life was destroyed in favor of financialization. Imagine being ten years away from retirement and the career you spent years learning and planned your life around is just gone, and there’s nothing similar left. Of course you would hate the politicians who actively participated in making this happen.
instead of retraining into 21st century high tech industries, they went and voted Trump into office
The 21st century still needs factories.
Throwing a temper tantrum is a lesser evil than participating in the tech industry.
The unemployed didn’t elect trump. Trump voters were on average richer than Hillary voters were on average richer than non voters.
Get out of here with that coastie shit.
Some machines may have been moved, but a huge part of China’s role as a new market was that it was a market for new industrial capital, just as Japan had been earlier. In fact the greatest pressures towards shifting industry to China was not the cheaper labor but the combined factors of aging industrial capital in the US vs more modern industrial capital being sold to China (and China had the same issue internally where it wound up with its own rust belts as the old industrial centers dating all the way back to the Japanese colonialization of Manchuria were abandoned or scrapped in favor of newer bases of industry) and the sheer room for growth that China’s large labor base provided.
That is to say, while the labor was cheaper it was the fact that businesses could expand rapidly and to an extent that they could not in the US while making use of more modern machines that really drove the shift, although it also has to be said that the US didn’t exactly deindustrialize either, because it also had a market for modern capital, but rather stagnated and saw a reduction in industrial labor even as industrial production continued to rise. Although it has to be mentioned that how the overall industrial supply chain wound up organized does inevitably involve China most of the time now and the two economies are heavily integrated with western industries relying on China as a supplier, buyer, or intermediary step in the production chain, to such an extent that I’ve seen the unironic argument made by ultraleft accelerationists that if China were to collapse than the US and Europe would surely follow and so they stated the destruction of China as their immediate goal (clearly that’s sociopathic detachment resulting from living in a world of pure ideology, even if their economic analysis is otherwise on point; I would argue the failing of that view is its complete and utter disregard for the lives and wellbeing of billions of people rather than not seeing potential cause and effect correctly).
They are left to rot by choice though. That factory is still a factory it just needs people to work it
Yeah, of course it’s by choice. But the federal government that had power to do anything about this was the one enabling it.
Yep, when the White Russians fled after the revolution the country just disintegrates when they stuff the factories and mills into their suitcases.
