Right. We have to come to grips with the fact that not all people are cut out for college or to be white collar knowledge workers. Many of the jobs that these people used to enjoy have been shipped overseas, meanwhile large amounts of unskilled labor is allowed to pour in. This has destroyed opportunities to make your way in life as a blue collar worker. But instead of reversing sweetheart legislation that makes it easy to ship jobs overseas and bring in cheap labor at home, we talk about UBI and raising minimum wage. Both of which will have even more devastating impacts on the middle and low economic classes.

Bringing back exported jobs is a short-term solution. It might solve the problem for a few years, but the fundamental problem is that most of the jobs that have left the Western sphere are low-skill jobs that are easy to automate. Moving these jobs back into the Western sphere will massively increase the financial motivation of companies to automate away these jobs, and in a few years we will be back to where we started.

No matter which way you slice it, there are just not going to be enough jobs for everyone in the future, and society needs to adapt to that.

> But instead of reversing sweetheart legislation that makes it easy to ship jobs overseas and bring in cheap labor at home,

No or low taxes on imports is sweetheart legislation? There is no way US labor prices (some of the highest in the world) were ever going to compete with the labor prices in developing countries where families live in a single room. Not to mention the lack of labor and environmental standards.

I am not aware of any US import taxes that were removed to allow this labor price arbitrage to occur. It was simply a fact of international shipping efficiencies making trade and the labor price arbitrage much easier.

There is a black market for labor.

Why is that relevant here? The scale of manufacturing causing jobs to be outsourced surely dwarfs it.

I’m familiar with the arguments on how higher minimum wages may harm the lower classes, but how would UBI “devastate” them?

We can bring back the manufacturing, but the jobs are highly unlikely to follow. Rather than 800 unionized workers working the assembly lines, it’s 8 robotics technicians overseeing the machines. This ratio will, obviously, vary depending upon exactly the product being manufactured.