Lippincott-
“Yeah, I hope Nike's stock goes to zero. Phil Knight is a traitor to his country who enriched himself at the expense of his fellow citizens.
If I saw him on fire I wouldn't piss to put him out.
Knight's big "innovation" in shoe manufacturing was figuring out how to be one of the first people to flood the American market with cheaply made plastic footwear from Asia. Knight didn't make better, more durable shoes; he made cheaper ones by blowing up the native American industry.
Access to slave labor is, in the short run, a competitive advantage over skilled free labor.
In 1990, 10 years after the Nike IPO, there were 85,000 Americans employed making shoes. Today there are only 10,000 and 99% of our shoes are made overseas. The only exception is footwear for the military.
Phil Knight, however, is worth $35 billion and Nike has a market cap of $90 billion.
In other words, the good middle class wages once generated by homegrown American shoe manufacturing have been transformed by outsourcing into equities owned by a small class of investors and one insanely wealthy oligarch.
Global free trade is a way for the powerful to screw over the middle class by forcing them to compete with third world slave labor.
Yes, with high tariffs, Americans would have to pay slightly more for shoes. In return, however, they would be subsidizing good paying jobs and a decentralized industrial base in their own communities.
Global free trade, on the other hand, subsidizes massive increases in asset valuation. If you are one of the first "in on the ground floor" then you can make insane amounts of money by blowing up middle class wages by outsourcing those jobs overseas.
Libertarians and Wall Street types love to call this "capitalism" and the "free market" at work, but in reality, they are defrauding their countrymen out of the opportunity to build products themselves.
Americans are no longer able to make shoes at home. That option is not available to you. How can we call this a "free market" when it constrains our choices?
Outsourcing is 100% a government subsidy. It is a privilege, allowed by the state, to a select few citizens who figure out how to manipulate the international market to their advantage.”