The two links you provided are about something very different.

What's going on with our economy is that people have become very used to seeing very high quality products made in China. A stroll through Walmart, Best Buy, Fry's Electronics, Home Depot, Lowe's, Sears, Kohls, Petco, etc. is all that's required to ascertain this.

Nearly everything sold at those retailers is made in China. In fact, short of things like obvious US-made products like bricks and lumber products (and I even hesitate to make that statement) everything else is made outside the US, mostly in China.

And quality is excellent.

It didn't use to be that way. China was synonymous with cheap junk. Sure, there's still cheap junk coming out of China but I think it is safe to say that most of what you can buy at the top retailers in the country is of fairly decent quality.

And so, when faced with a price difference between a high priced US-made good and a lower priced Chinese product the effects you linked to don't really apply. In fact, in some cases the Chinese product is of equal or better quality when objectively compared to the US-made product.

Here we have a case where paying a low price does, in fact, deliver a good-to-excellent quality product.

Luxury goods are a different story. They don't necessarily obey the laws of physics.

We have a problem. A really big problem. I wish I was smart enough to know what the solution might be. I don't. I know bits and pieces of it. Yet it is way too complicated. There is one thing I do know, Trump's idea of "bringing jobs back" sounds great but it is easy to see, given our discussion, that this is just-about impossible.

Can we start manufacturing excellent iPhones if we build fully automated factories? Nope. Not a chance.

Why?

Because China has reached a point where labor cost advantages are not the only advantages they enjoy. I don't have the time to get into the details so I'll be brief. Manufacturing businesses depend on efficient supply pipelines in order to produce product at the lowest possible cost. Chinese industrial cities are setup such that the supply pipelines are very short and efficient. Everything is an hour or less from the OEM. There are towns that make microwave ovens and all of the sub-contractors for the microwave oven makers surround them. Same with other product categories.

This advantage is huge and it is one we do not have. We don't make semiconductors or motors or almost anything here any more. You'd have to take the desert in Nevada and build a huge manufacturing town consisting of fully automated factories producing every component needed to make an iPhone in order to reach the point where we MIGHT be able to make iPhone on par with China.

That's what I call a "gulp" moment. When you realize just how terrible our position might be in a globally competitive marketplace.

As I said before, an artificially high forced minimum wage only exists completely disconnected from the context and the realities of what's going on in the real world. And this, precisely, is the reason it is so destructive. Companies don't need to pay lower wages because they are greedy. They need to reduce their costs because they are getting killed right and left by China, and high government-imposed minimum wages only means one thing: Our government is helping China force these companies out of business one by one. This is not what we should be doing.

The argument for protection of the poor sound interesting until you realize that the more businesses we kill off and the more jobs we export the reality of high minimum wages is that the very people the idea seeks to help will be the first to end-up on the street by the millions.

This is a math problem. And politics and politicians are fucking it all up because they do not suffer direct consequences and their lives are secure. I mean, look at the Obama's. They are getting paid SIXTY MILLION DOLLARS to write a couple of books. Their lives are completely decoupled from the policies they have forced upon us. They are set for life while everyone else will have to suffer. And that's the way it is.