Quote:
Originally posted by Superbelt
I have a plan I would like to see a brave politican champion. I think, if all conditions were met, it would do a lot of good, not just for american and other industrialized nations, but for the world over.
I know it's a bit of "social engineering" and protectionism, which some here see as evil themes, but they are on too grand of a scale to really be anything quite so selfish.
Well, here it is:
A worldwide human condition tariff.
The first step is we need to get all G8 nations to agree to implement a worldwide tariff. This tariff is done on a sliding scale and takes into account both human rights and environment.
If your nation has lax environmental standards and you are degrading your environment, a tax gets placed on your goods. We tax you if you pay your workers, for example, 89 cents a day or lock them in unhealthy buildings or make them do obscenely dangerous tasks or any other human rights violations.
The tax would have to be so high as to make it cheaper to manufacture in the G8 nations rather than shitholes because the tariffs bite you in the ass so hard that it becomes counterproductive.
This would have two effects, it would keep jobs from being sent overseas, and it would bring up the standards in those countries so we could reduce the tariffs as they made progress. Eventually the standards in those countries become equivalent to ours and there is no more need for the tax, and there will be no incentive to outsource to that nation specifically for cheap labor.
For this to work all G8 nations have to agree to it and implement it rigidly. The G8 consists of USA, Japan, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Canada and Russia.
This bloc represents most of the worlds consumption. Once we have this, it would be fairly easy to pressure the rest of the developed world to follow suit and join up with the international tariffs. We could threaten to implement a penalty tariff for NOT joining the group. That should bring in everyone.
I think it would work. The world needs to grow some balls and just do it. Who likes the idea, and who would vote for a candidate that is pushing it?
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Superbelt,
How do we deal with the negative repurcussions that could occur if the tax stymies economic development?
If the nations have lax policies to draw corporations to operate there, why would, or even how could, they improve the economic environment so people still want to do business there?
If we tax, say a company in Argentina, because it allows companies to dump crud in their streams, wouldn't the company just relocate to another nation? That actually seems to be what you want, so they will relocate to a nation that isn't so environmentally lax. While this might prod nations to change policies, it could have serious repurcussions to their economy once industries are forced out by high surcharges.
While this might stem the outflow of jobs from the G8 nations, it wouldn't do much to the economies of the developing nations.
I would like you to incorporate some safety valves into your model. One of the things that might be useful is the notion that companies actually benefit from workers who can buy their products. Market saturation occurs more frequently when you have less consumers. I suspect that staving off that saturation point is the focus of excellent business minds.
And why does seretogis keep getting the last word 
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