You 'people' should remember this thread the next time you shit yourselves and scream about income disparity and corporate greed.
I think that you need a primer in Economics 101.
Should American families quit our jobs but instead raise chickens and grow tomatoes in our backyards or continue to work at the jobs that we do best and buy groceries from the supermarket that buys from specialized farms? It's foolish for families to seek self-sufficiency given the opportunities offered by the modern economy. The same goes for countries. There are very good reasons for nations to produce different things and trade for the goods and services they don’t produce.
There are two distinct reasons countries find it advantageous to produce different things — the same reasons it makes sense for individuals to specialize and buy stuff from other people rather than trying to be self-sufficient.
First, people are different. Imagine that Jack and Jill are two smart, ambitious young people who have just entered college. Why might Jack become a lawyer while Jill becomes a surgeon? Well, maybe Jill has steady hands but hates arguing, while Jack has a phenomenal memory but can’t stand the sight of blood.
Second, there are inherent advantages to mastering one trade rather than dabbling in many areas. This is obviously true for jobs that require a lot of formal education: Nobody has the time to become both a surgeon and a top-flight lawyer. But it’s also true for skills that aren’t taught in universities. It takes a lot of practice and experience to become a good plumber, which anyone who’s hired a bad one knows all too well.
The same logic drives trade between countries. The United States doesn’t have much of an apparel industry left, but if it did, we can be sure that our workers would be more productive than workers in Bangladesh, in the sense that the average worker could make more shirts or pairs of pajamas per day. Yet Bangladesh is a big exporter of clothing, while America is a big importer. Why?
Because Bangladeshi garment workers are less productive than their counterparts in America, but they’re closer to advanced-country productivity in labor-intensive industries like clothing than they are in other sectors. Their low overall productivity translates into relatively low wages, but they’re productive enough in clothing manufacturing that these low wages give them a cost advantage.
If Trump forced clothing manufacture back to the U.S., American workers would be shifting their skills away from more productive work, like building jets, down to less productive jobs, and producing garments that are far more expensive. Buying more expensive garments means that they don't have money to buy other items. That doesn't help workers, consumers or the country.
In a previous post, I wrote about the theory of
comparative advantage, the idea that countries trade because they’re different. (The U.S. doesn't grow bananas but other countries do. So, it makes sense to buy their bananas and sell what we grow or manufacture.) Comparative advantage is the biggest reason nations engage in international trade.
It is not the only reason. Another reason is access to supplies and intermediate products needed to make end products. Canada makes cheaper steel because they have cheap hydro-electric power. It makes sense to buy their steel.
A former high-ranking Apple executive once said, “The entire supply chain is in China now,” “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”
The point is that manufacturing plants don’t exist in isolation; they benefit a lot from being part of a manufacturing cluster, with specialized suppliers and a large pool of workers with the right skills close at hand. Apple couldn't easily move all that here, even if it wanted to.
