jack ma on China trade cheating

[Cicada]

https://m.

Ma said America had a perfect strategy: outsource low paying and unpleasant jobs while keeping intellectual property, brands, etc which pay well and are more pleasant. And it worked. He wanted to buy a Motorola beeper which cost 8 dollars to make but sold for $250. He says American firms made mountains of money. But we spent 14 trillion dollars on wars. We could have instead invested in working class jobs in the Midwest. When he was growing up America focused on great firms like Boeing but later we sent all our money to Silicon Valley and Wall Street. In the recession Wall Street firms lost 90 trillion dollars. What if we had sent money instead to the Midwest, infrastructure for companies, blue collar and white collar training?

He says China did not steal our money. We pissed it away on stupid things.

Ali Baba, the firm Jack Ma runs, has doubled in value this past year.

[RandySF]

1. Jack Ma is just as slimy as Trump.

[Cicada]

2. He made good points though

Our initial outsourcing profits vastly exceeded all the money we spent on foreign wages and costs. We COULD have taxed those profits for common good spending in our own country. Instead we wasted tax revenues on wars. We had laws which increased finance profits from 8% of national income to 28%, fueling income inequality and the Great Recession.

Ma may be as creepy as Trump but unlike Trump he's not foolish and stupid.

[RandySF]

3. Jack Ma: If Youre Poor At 35, You Deserve It

“You are poor, because you have no ambition. Ambition is living a life of great ideals; a magnificent goal in life that must be realised.”


http://christopherlewer.com/jack-ma-if-youre-poor-at-35/

[Cicada]

6. The I'm rich so you're lazy fallacy

Ma is rich primarily because of the sheer luck that he was in the right internet explosion at the right time and the right place. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are smarter than Ma: they know that they had the great luck to be at the crest of a super massive tide leading to their billions.

[msongs]

4. americans want cheap junk from china more than their own jobs. too bad eh? nt

[Cicada]

5. The beeper: $8 to China, $242 to Motorola

His point is that we could have used the $242 profit to create many good jobs in the rust belt but instead spent the profits on economic inequality, wars, Wall Street.

I agree withMa that we should ship Miserable Foxconn jobs to low paid Chinese workers in return for vastly larger profits for Motorola etc provided we wisely use those vast profits for better jobs here. The value of our 100 biggest firms rose 100 fold. Think about what a vast amount of wealth that is. Outsourcing the crummy jobs created vast vast treasures here which we COULD have used to, well, REALLY make America great again.

We COULD have used $14 trillion dollars wasted on dumb wars, $90 trillion wasted on Wall Street scams, to create infrastructure jobs - good jobs - converting the rust belt into a business Valhalla more efficient than export-creating Germany. We could have used the wasted resources to make our blue collar and white collar workers more skilled and more productive. We could have made political choices to direct the huge gains in our economy to workers rather than very few elites.

Outsourcing miserable low wage jobs isn't what hurt us. What hurt us was the theft of the vast profits by greedy elites and craven political leaders doing their bidding.