Replies to post #7543 on Apple Inc (AAPL)

[NewHerb]

Fair trade:

Ole Milton Friedman says if Chinese workers are paid less than their counterparts in the US, it is the equivalent of China taxing its people to make us cheap goods. Let them do it!

Eventually, currency exchanges will even things out. We have seen that happen with regards to Japan. Remember in the 1980s when Japan's trade was so one sided they couldn't bring their profit dollars home. They had so many dollars if they started buying yen the yen would strengthen to the point of no trade advantage. The Japanese had to leave their profit dollars here in the US. They bought everything from Rockefeller Plazy to a golf course in my town. The effect was to drive up real estate prices here for a few years but, in the long run, they ended up selling their US properity for less than they paid for it. What goes around comes around!

[langostino]

Altaire - "business incentives"

Isn't "incentives" just another word for subsidy? There can't be a subsidy without a subsidizer, no? There is no free lunch. What you're really doing is artifically jacking up the price of goods and services and asking the customers to pay that "tax". That's the functional equivalent of a (regressive) national sales tax, and pretty close to the sort of corporate welfare many think is the ultimate ruin of American businesses that come to rely on the handouts and thus lose incentive to be competitive straight-up. Worse, when you create corporate welfare, the vast majority of the effective welfare goes to .... the highest paid executives. That's the just the way it works when you try to protect the worker level by artificially boosting the business' average selling prices. Either the business increases profitability (which winds up benefitting the shareholders), or it proportionally increases compensation packages -- and we all know where the lionshare of total compensation in most corporations goes.