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re: An accurate statement
Tom Brosz — (archived)

By the way, the current situation isn't a flaw in free market philosophy. It's a flaw in the idea that you can permanently keep your standard of living high by passing laws keeping other standards of living low. Visualize the luxurious mansion on a southern plantation prior to the Civil War. Free markets and free labor at work? Or something else?

While most of the world was subsistence farming, and dying young, we paid workers high wages and lifetime benefits for turning a bolt on an assembly line. After WWII, most of the rest of the civilized world was rubble. We had a near-monopoly on industry for quite a while. It had to level off eventually. I think you're a bit pessemistic about it leveling off at 16th century serf, but as we see in the auto industry, cradle-to-grave goodies as part of a labor contract isn't going to cut it any more.

Tariffs or other measures might help, for a while, but it's putting a finger in the dike. So is blocking off the border, come to that. Market forces always work, like gravity.

Now the rest of the world is discovering middle-class living, and we're running up against some limits. Labor problems are the least of them. We could do a whole thread on energy demand.

The good news is that standards of living are increasing around the planet. "Leveling off" works both ways.

But how to keep the transition relatively painless? Wish I knew. One of the reasons I've been pushing for space industrialization for thirty years is the realization that the Earth is too small a space for a planetary industrial civilization.

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