Does America need to bring back child labor in order to be more competitive?
No, we don’t need child labor. Although in your argument you may have hit on a few causes of the outsourcing of jobs… Pensions and complaining. Here in the US we had a massive explosion of industry in the 1800’s. Prior to that most Industry was in Europe (England, especially). During this time period, however, thanks to the natural resources here, our access to transportation hubs, and a rather highly skilled but inexpensive labor force many factories moved from Europe to the States. In economics this is called comparative advantage. Now what happened is that in the US we had labor unions and many other factors pop up that have basically made it expensive for industry to locate here. Thus, when new regions obtained a comparative advantage, industry moved. The South used to have textile industries but practically all of them have since shut down and moved to Thailand and Vietnam. This is because in industries that are labor intensive (i.e. the industries that create lots of jobs) it m
