A common theme among all manufacturers we met this trip in China, Malaysia and Thailand is the scarcity of labor.\u00a0 Multiple factors contribute to this situation — increases in the standard of living, more job competition giving workers more job choices, more capitalized production methods requiring more trained labor\u00a0 — over time, factors like these reduce the differential cost of labor between less and more developed countries.\u00a0 Low priced foreign goods to American markets, to the extent price is influenced by cheap labor, will become more expensive through natural economic trends.\u00a0 The currency intervention proposed by the Obama administration to make Asian goods more expensive to Americans by fiat is unnecessary and will only further dislocate real value from monetary value.<\/p>\n
Another theme we heard from the Thai and Malay is they do not rely upon governmental solutions to support their private market activities.\u00a0 They see reliance on government by private industry as at best a pointless exercise, and at worst a necessary evil.\u00a0 This differs from the views given by the Chinese state newspapers.\u00a0 Their official propaganda reads more like the New York Times and the Washington Post which see government as the primary initiator of economic activity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A common theme among all manufacturers we met this trip in China, Malaysia and Thailand is the scarcity of labor.\u00a0 Multiple factors contribute to this situation — increases in the standard of living, more job competition giving workers more job choices, more capitalized production methods requiring more trained labor\u00a0 — over time, factors like these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1926","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-economics","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elbertcounty.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}