Originally Posted by Jonesy

Gotta love how the WTO tells us what to do.

Originally Posted by PursuitOfHappinessParty

That would require a calculator made by Diebold......

BTW;
We've had the debate below before, we're both pretty stuck in our ways. I reread my previous post just now and wish to apologize for the elitest and unneccessary tone.

Originally Posted by PursuitOfHappinessParty

To me, either you believe in minimum wage, or not.
If you don't, whatever.

If you do, then you can't allow imported items that pay 1/100th of 1 percentage to wage to the person making the item (Like a shirt or shoe). That harms the whole purpose and ideology behind the reason for minimum wage. To prevent slave labor. Now you can't handicap that nor can you as a Western Democracy support slavery of any type anywhere. If you allow them the freedom to undercut us at the wage area, we must balance at the tax area. That money is can then be used for foreign policy right back if need be. The point will be that both sides will have postive motivations for balancing the difference and it won't be at the cost of the American working class, nor the backs of slaves.
As to present and future WTOs, without any national boundry-altering special-interest Corporatist agendas by our elected officials, the non-threatening and completely justifiable circumstances combined with our GNP, military promises, military period, and most importantly to world economy SHOPPING AND BUYING HABITS would tend to make countries a tad bit skittish.
They also won't forget that Bush proved that if he has the will, and by extenstion the mandate of American Citizens, he is quite capable of telling other countries waving signatures to stuff it.

IMHO, of course. You could probably say that when it comes to policy and security I'm an isolationist. I also believe that we can balance our economy and foreign trade with American products. Service and Technology aren't the top of the ladder, they are but a rung. We've gotten too far away from a balance of these industries with production. Creation is a conservative engine of revenue generation as opposed to NeoCon redistribution. We've left an entire revenue source to rot with ruinous trade ideology. In a really, really big country with lots and lots of consumers. With lots of natural resources and still has lots of rural space. We have the international buying clout to do it.

Originally Posted by DRS112

My other post really only addressed it from America's standpoint...but the truth is it is bigger than us and probably bigger than us and whatever country that could be talked about specifically...

Ethically it is wrong to pay "slave wages", that is it is wrong to pay wages below the host countries minimum wage or use forced labor. But to call 1/1000 of what we make slave labor is kind of disingenuous...that 1/1000 after PPP may be more than those people have ever seen in their life. But that's not the end of it....sometimes developing countries keep their minimum wage low to attract FDI, especially if they have a huge surplus of labor. This allows the manufacturing infrastructure to be built and for the population to become more skilled, while lowering the unemployment rate...They can then do business with other developing countries...kind of a multiplier effect....

Not to mention...do you think the tech boom of the 90's happened by pure chance? Or as a result of cheaper products and our ability to shift resources away from manufacturing towards developing technological products.

So what's the alternative? Discourage trade with those countries? massive numbers of unemployment there is more moral than comparatively low wages? Is the alternative protecting the status quo of our economy here? How do you we progress beyond what is to what will be if our goal is protecting the status quo?