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   From: gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick)
   Newsgroups: sci.environment
   Date: 3 Jan 93 04:44:10 GMT
   References: <JMC.93Jan2145832@SAIL.Stanford.EDU>
   Organization: STAFF STRATEGIES - Anthropologists & Training Agents
   Lines: 19


   In article <JMC.93Jan2145832@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU writes:

    > We are exploiting cheap foreign labor, and if we couldn't do so,
    > there would be a small reduction in living standards.  However,
    > 1.2 billion Chinese have just recently made themselves available
    > for exploitation, this being better than their other alternatives.

   Well, this is *partly* true. The Chinese are only making their cheap
   labour available within the context of their national endeavours to
   keep the worst of the exploiters at arms length, toward positioning
   themselves to benefit by exploiting other resources in turn. The
   Philippines are also having the Americans leave, while the whole of
   the Asia-Pacfic rim keeps an acute weather eye constantly on Japan.

   The matter addresses equitable terms of trade within a wider drive
   toward political sovereignty and stability, yes?

   Gil

I suspect that "equitable terms of trade" is a bad idea.  Presumably
it means an agreement about prices.

Consider the U.S. sugar quotas.  This permits each of a number of
sugar producing countries to sell their quota amount within the U.S.
at U.S. internal prices which are far higher than world prices.  These
quotas were established as the result of a compromise between
importers and domestic sugar producers.  They can incidentally be used
for rewarding friends and punishing enemies.  The Cuban sugar quota,
one of the largest, was abolished when Castro went communist.
Countries with quotas can get U.S.  prices for part of their
production and undercut Castro for the rest of the market and still
make a profit.  This puts Cuba in a bad way.  It would be very hard
for a new country to get into the sugar producing business, because it
probably couldn't get a U.S. quota.

Any agreement about prices requires quotas in order to prevent new
producers from undercutting the "fair" prices.  If such an agreement
had been in effect, it would have been very hard for China to get
quotas when Taiwan and Korea, etc. already had them.  Now all they
have to do is compete on price and quality.  You might also get
anomalies.  If Taiwan had a quota for toys at a certain price, as
their manufacture got more efficient, Taiwanese manufacturers and
workers might make "windfall" profits, while less efficient
countries campaigned against any reduction in the quota price.

Within the U.S., a similar role has been played by the concept of
parity.  The idea was (a bit before 1910) that there ought to be
a certain ratio between the price an American farmer received for
each bushel of wheat, corn, etc. and the prices farmers paid for
a "market basket" of things farmers buy.  Politicians soliciting
the farm vote would promise to support prices at 100 percent of
parity.  We still have the price supports, though not at 100
percent of parity.  As it happened, farming became more efficient
faster than most other branches of the economy.
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

Newsgroups: sci.environment,talk.politics.misc,alt.activism