stevelovesmoonspell wroteOf course you care more that the Mexicans are being harmed more by Nafta than your fellow Americans. If the idea was implemented it would make importing less expensive for corporations, meaning our port cities would be less desirable, but this is no issue for you as "Fair trade" inevitably means fucking our standard of life so that the Mexican workers can have our jobs and those fucking Zapatists can stop rallying with those stupid black masks. Let me put this in a way you may at least partially understand, trade at least in its most base form should be profitable for both parties. When we have a piece of legislation that only boosts one side of the fence, i,e the megacorporations that stand to profit and the foreign countries that get less fucked (they do get a labor pool) after all, then you're shooting your own collectivist feel good logic in the foot. You would essentially ship our jobs over to Mexico, and yet this doesn't strike me as alien of a concept, who told you this would be a good thing?
My fellow Americans were fucked by Reagan, you asshole in the 80s. NAFTA wasn't enacted until 1994. All NAFTA did was fuck over local farms in Mexico forcing those workers to migrate here and enabling corporations to use labor from Mexico on the cheap, something which Reagan already opened the door for. The Reagan, the conservative man's dalai lama is who shipped jobs oversea,.
steve wrotethe simple right to buy a house, speak your mind
Those aren't equivalent rights. Not owning a house and living on a collective farm does not radically harm my freedom in the same way that not being able to speak my mind does. QED, no?
V wroteOne of those criticisms is that it encourages producers to overproduce, which in turn results in excess product, which in turn leads to lower prices in the non-fair trade sector. Which, of course is bad for non-fair trade producers.
I'm unsure why fair trade would encourage over-production in ways that free trade doesn't. And non-fair trade producers, i.e., free trade producers, value competition so much shouldn't they be forced to compete with fair trade products. If fair trade can make a better product then fuck free trade.
V wroteBut, people are free to buy whatever goods they want for whatever reasons they want, so whatever.
Fair trade is just that. People buying socially conscious goods.
My bit about Paul's comments are that why should we buy jeans from China if they're being made by children when we could have those jobs here. Paul thinks we should continue getting them from China because they're cheap is how I read that quote from earlier. Yes, the question was phrased at a federal level but the federal level is the only way individuals could control what companies like Levi does, in my opinion. Yes, people could just not buy Levi jeans but what if every jeans company used children labor, the people would have no say in the products they have to choose from and hence govt serves a purpose to step in.