Sorrow

"I believe it was one of the former presidents [who] said, I pity the businessman that wants to make a coat so cheap that the person making the coat will starve in the process. I mean, that is sad," Fain said.
UAW President Shawn Fain explains why he supports Trump's tariffs

Here's what President Harrison is actually reputed to have said: "I pity that man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth shall starve in the process." It's not a huge difference, but it is one worth noting. Mr. Fain is arguing that the problem with the American economy is that wealthy business owners are seeking to drive down prices to make higher profits for themselves; while President Harrison was being critical of the public's willingness to beggar their neighbors in the pursuit of better material living standards for themselves.

There's always enough sadness to go around. Anyone who cannot either opt out of the need to sell their labor and/or the products of their labor or set the value of same is always going to be in precarious position in one way or another, because they depend on, but cannot control, the level of demand for the goods and services they provide. And when people have to compete for the opportunity to earn a livelihood, the loser is always likely to starve. Mr. Fain would rather than autoworkers in Mexico or Cambodia starve, because they can't be members of the UAW.

Mr. Fain makes the point that: "And it's infuriating that our livelihoods have been stripped from us for decades and no one's cared." This is about as close as Mr. Fain comes to pointing a finger at the public at large. And I think that he's right, mainly because the United States isn't really a society where people care for one another as much as they're angry about other people not caring about them.

I was chatting with co-workers today, and the fact that I don't have an Amazon Prime subscription came up. The fact of the matter is that I don't order from Amazon often enough for it to be worthwhile; I'd rather go to local businesses to get what I'm looking for, because there are services that I can get from them that I can't get from Amazon, and if the local stores go under, those services simply become unavailable. My coworkers pointed out the convenience of being able to go online and get whatever, but one of the things that Mr. Fain is railing against is that impulse to go for cheap and convenient, without thinking about the broader costs. Simply forcing people to pay more for cars, however, is not going to make American autoworkers more valuable to the rest of the public; they're simply going to lament the increase in prices, which they'll see as wholly unnecessary.

In the end, as I see it, the problem is one of education and perception. It doesn't make sense for a young person in the United States to compete with a young person in Mexico for factory work that either of them could do to a satisfactory level. What you end up with is jingoistic calls for the young Mexican to starve in the name of higher prices. The goal should be for the American to do work that requires the education and other resources that they have here that the young Mexican simply can't access. And that's where we're falling down.

And, while I'm at it, let me throw standards of living into the mix. Americans, like everyone else, I suspect, prefer to feel wealthy. And that means being able to access things at comparatively low prices, which creates pressure to lower labor costs. And businesses respond to that, although it's through greater automation more often than it is through offshoring. And that becomes a ratchet... when workers are scarce, employers will turn to automation, and they don't go back when unemployment rises.

In the end, the problems are things that tariffs cannot fix, because it wasn't a lack of tariffs that created them in the first place.