If ipads weren't made in China, they would be prohibitively expensive. Example? The 30%+ premium on American-made cars.
You're only considering the front-end costs and ignoring the back-end costs. If wages increase by 30% and prices increase by 25%, then our nation has gained. Imagine eliminating most of our trade deficit and internalizing by being self-reliant.
Imagine, now, the extra expense on everything that goes in to building an ipad: the fabs to spin the ICs, the shops that assemble the boards, the panel fabrication units...etc, etc. AMD tried to build a fab in New York. Even despite huge tax breaks from the state, it still wasn't possible to open it...they had to sell it off. Without access to companies like Chartered and TSMC, we wouldn't have half the little gadgets we have, because they simply wouldn't be financially viable. And that's not even taking in to account the raw materials...most of which simply aren't available in sufficient quantities in the US.
If we can put a man on the Moon, we can figure out how to manufacture IPads and all of their individual components.
One of the big myths the free market dogmatists seem to put forth is the notion that Americans are just retarded now and are incapable of producing tangible wealth.
Aside from that, protective tariffs would price us out of foreign markets. Tell me, how do you make an economy grow without access to external markets? That's why isolationism doesn't work.
Right now we're losing hundreds of billions of dollars every year because of our trade deficit. If we were self reliant and didn't have the trade deficit, we would realize a net savings of hundreds of billions of dollars a year in addition to other benefits (less unemployment and the social problems it causes, less need for government welfare).
You want to force American companies to use American labor. Tell me, how does that work? How does the iPhone compete in foreign markets against an HTC phone at a third the price? You may not have noticed, but in comparison to cheaper phones, the iPhone's foreign sales are aren't great:
http://www.businessinsider.com/android-iphone-market-share-2010-8
It can't. And American-made goods and services can't compete against nations where the labor is paid fifty cents/hour without environmental and labor regulations. But so what? It's not as though we are "competing" right now as evidenced by our trade deficits. All we're doing is merging our nation's labor market and economy with the standard of living of the third world.
Or, maybe you just want to make it so that products sold by foreign companies in the US are prohibitively expensive. How does that help anyone? All that does is make EVERYTHING more expensive. And now that we're no longer exporting anything, because everything we make is more expensive and foreign countries will have enacted reactive tariffs, our wealth stagnates...buying power never goes up, and we're worse off than we were before.
It helps because we would have become a responsible, self-reliant country and prices would adjust to American free market prices. Front-end costs for some goods and services would increase and wages would increase as well in addition to large decreases in unemployment and the social problems it causes and the amount of tax money spent on social welfare programs. Imagine adding a couple hundred billion dollars per year to our economy.
But, you CANNOT force companies to use American labor. That is not the answer and does not address the issue. Americans need to change their entitlement way of thinking before domestic manufacturing will be universally viable for all products. They don't need to be competitive with Chinese wages...they need to be competitive with Chinese wages + the cost of the logistics of getting product to and from China, which isn't cheap.
I'd love to see more domestic manufacturing, but, frankly, American's don't deserve the jobs. They're all a bunch of whiney, entitlement-minded fucktards.
You mean that Americans need to stop feeling that they're entitled to an American lower-middle class standard of living as opposed to knowing their place and accepting the average Chinese standard of living?
Why can't we force any business that sells goods or services in the United States to either produce it using American labor or to submit an import credit to show that an equivalent amount of American labor was purchased in other countries (Warren Buffet's import credits idea.)? Is there some sort of a metaphysical barrier that prevents us from doing this? Would it be more palatable to the free market dogmatist types if such a policy were referred to as the "National Personal Responsibility and Self-Reliance Policy"?
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