An area that has a lot of highly skilled trades or professions still needs products and services provided locally. If you require that everyone who supports those highly skilled workers lives far away, but they’re only paid for the time they’re at work, you’re effectively paying them even less, and consuming…

“Higher pay involves cost to someone along the line.” That’s zero-sum game thinking. So much for awareness of economic realities.

If the purpose of the minimum wage is to provide the basic necessities for that one person and explicitly not to support a family, then its purpose is eugenic and evil — especially if it was created in the 50s, when women were expected to be homemakers and you were expected to get married, settle down, and have…

Absolutes don’t work. Deflecting criticism of the effects of the self-perpetuating accumulation of wealth and power in the US by saying there is no better system is disingenuous or foolhardy, depending on where you peg it on the malice-incompetence spectrum. This is not about a singular choice between…

I’m a big believer in not letting personal achievements blind me to economic realities.

Which way does it work? If I consider myself a world citizen, does your job leave the country?

You write “but we live in a capitalistic economy” as if it’s either an immutable fact or the best of all possible worlds.

The problem (which Walmart had no small part in creating) is that if Walmart doesn’t offer the cheapest Chinese-made product, Target and Home Depot and Costco and Amazon still will.

Well, you know, it’s a lot easier to divide the additional money ten ways than ten thousand ways.

If you’re jealous of what Union workers have, maybe the problem isn’t that they have a Union, but rather that you don’t. Or maybe the problem is that neither of you have a government that acts as if the needs of the many outweigh the greed of the few.

You’re right, “made in America” isn’t very useful. The label needs to be smarter. It’s not perfect, but consider a label that indicates % domestic content and the % of other content by country for any country with at least 10%.

But your job will never leave the country, right?

The measure of his success is “development gets funded.”

This car is not vinyl.

CBS is not HBO.

You laugh now, but when you get that first issue of AARP Magazine and your only choices for a premium but not expensive ‘merican branded crossover are Buicks, and someone reminds you they’re all made in Chiyna, you will go off on a muttering tirade so long that your Sanka will get cold.

Zeppelin.

The appeal isn’t that they’re impressive.

In 1996 I bought my first new car and let my 1989 Isuzu I-Mark RS hatchback go. I only had it two years, but every once in a while it would refuse to start unless I waited a few minutes, and a couple of times the engine cut out.

This seems like half empty gesture, half set-up.