alt Hacker News> Big issue though is knowing that even if I pay someone 2x the going rate for an employee it still will not be a living wage. Not sure the fix there.
The fix is you will just have to buy American and pay higher prices for higher "living wages". There's no way around it besides taxes or tariffs on foreign goods to equalize the wage/price difference (which does have some down sides).
I buy American and western-made products as much as possible, and I pay higher prices (assuming high quality) for those higher wages. If you want low cost, you can't by definition support "living wages".
There's no "oh if only the CEO makes less" way around it either. Labor is simply more expensive in the west and will remain so and you can vote with your wallet, as I do, or you can pay people less than living wages.
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How many people are willing to pay more for America/Western-made products? How many are able to correctly know which companies are honest, and which are finding loopholes (e.g. bringing in underpaid temporary workers from abroad, finding the bare minimum for a product to be qualified as "Made in X", writing "Designed in America").
And how many people will be willing to pay a premium when the locally made products are worse quality than foreign products? It's happening right now with Chinese consumer goods (e.g. robotic vacuum cleaners), EVs, etc. Eventually there's a high possibility you won't be able to buy anything in the product category you want.
The way around it is not having to pay people wages at all which I hope American manufacturers are trying to do as much as possible. They already have totally dark factories in China and if we want to bring manufacturing back we will have to do it as well.
If the wage difference is what is stopping you, then you aren't really trying to compete. There will always be a shithole country with dirt-cheap wages where companies can get stuff made with virtually-unlimited manual labor. Unless you are going to turn the US into a country with third-world living standards, you won't be able to compete with that, so don't even bother trying. Still want to compete on price rather than quality, speed, or services? Automate everything and make wages irrelevant.
China already figured this out, mind you. Their wages have been exploding as the country has developed, and due to their horrible one-child policy they are facing a giant population cliff. They have been pushing very hard to switch their factories from cheap labor to automation, and those dirt-cheap Chinese EVs our Western politicians are working so hard to block in order to keep the horribly outdated Western car manufacturers alive are the direct result of that.