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somenameformetoday at 6:40 AM1 replyview on HN

The reality of the world is that when the US sets e.g. environmental or labor standards, we basically end up offshoring the affected industries to other places. Because those standards increase the cost of production which makes it more economical to produce stuff in a country that doesn't have such standards. With completely free trade, everything would be made in whichever country has the lowest standards, which is rather contrary to the implied values when passing environmental and labor standards in the first place.

You could then try to make laws that countries we import from must abide certain standards, but just gets gamed endlessly. For instance cacao/chocolate makes extensive use of child slavery [1]. There have been numerous lawsuits over this until the Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that you could no longer sue Nestle/Cargill/Hershey/etc over child slavery in their supply lines. They were being sued because their oversight came down to asking, 'Hey you're not using child labor right?' 'Nah.' 'Cheers then, carry on.'

When a company's goal is to not see something, they do a very good job of becoming blind.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labour_in_cocoa_producti...


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nltoday at 7:01 AM

Labor costs are orders of magnitude more than costs added by environmental or labor standards.

The average hourly rate in the US is $42.50. In Vietnam is is $6.30, in the Philippines it is $5.40[1]

These aren't people living in poverty - they live well.

OTOH environmental legislation costs are harder to come by, but [2] estimates around 10% in a number of case studies. To be specific, that would mean US cost would be $4 less - that's still around 6 times the cost of Vietnam

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-hourly-earnings

[2] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

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