Monday, October 21, 2013

The Free Market: Tough Love


I don’t believe that more productive forms of production are bad for the economy. I believe that it can hurt groups of people in the short term with layoffs and the removal of jobs in a community as either a more effective group of people take over or there are technological advances that come into play that shift how much the goods cost to produce. This is just a shifting of the economy through the use of the invisible hand. Unfortunately it sometimes hurts people but that is just the market’s way of telling people to change what they’re doing and find something that works better and is more effective.
                In our current world climate I believe we are seeing this happen with the exportation of the United States labor to other countries where manual labor is dramatically cheaper than it is in the U.S. . In China sweatshops are packed with people willing to do work for a fraction of the price that U.S. citizens would work for that allows companies to purchase cheap goods. While the moralities of such practices are in question the economic sense behind it is sound. Unfortunately for U.S. citizens this means that many of the jobs that previously allowed the middle class to thrive are exported. This has been causing many issues such as a decrease in factory jobs. Even though many people wouldn’t want to do these jobs the simple fact that they are no longer available are forcing people to go to other avenues to work. In my mind this is a significant factor in why a college education is so important in today’s job market. There simply aren’t as many entry level positions open to people, which forces a decision to achieve higher education or poverty.

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