| Mr Khan said:
Let's take the development of the tech industry in the USA. Used to be that there were 2 major sectors: Silicon Valley and the Route 128 Sector near Boston. For various reasons not particularly relating to the viability of the tech sector as a whole, the Route 128 companies were outcompeted and failed. Now, if you live in Boston and you find yourself unemployed with the only other growing part of your sector on the other end of the damn country. If you've got a family, and are living in an era before the internet made this thing a little easier, if all you're good for is the tech sector and the industry is growing on the other side of the country and you have outstanding debts over here, how do you get there? What of the collapse of skilled manufacturing in America? The rust belt where companies disappeared and nothing came in to replace them, leaving behind workers who had a decent living behind them, but weren't really good for anything else and anything related moved quite far away. Now, i suppose the answer to this is "if you kick minimum wages out, the market will accomodate excess labor," which could be true, but for the simple purpose that hiring individuals takes time, capital investment, and the capital to hire might not be there if you have a ton of unemployed people in the first place (lowering demand and all). Market reaction time and the fact that jobs don't just happen to appear where you live means that more people would remain destitute longer under optimal free-market conditions, moreso than your scenario suggests. |
Very first point: in a free market society, there would be less "free capital" (read: printed money, centrall planned interest rates( which would result in fewer mal-investments, and greatly reduce the number of companies/induestries that burst up and then suddenly collapse. It will still happen, but with far less frequency. What would be far more likely is that Route 128 would be slowly outcompeted, and the industry would shrink over time. Thus, available labour would tend to be more of a trickle, then a surge.
HOWEVER, let's take the extremely rare case that such a thing does happen in a free market society. What would happen with labour?
Well, first of all, the demand for tech-related jobs won't disappear immediately. Plenty of firms/people need assistance with tech, setting up systems, maintenance, etc. Some of the labour would be absorbed there. Some of the companies involved directly in Route 128 would survive, even if in a much reduced version of before, some labour would never lose their job.
Some of the companies in California would cherry-pick the very best talent and move them over (they do this already, and not just across States, tech companies in Silicon Valley will pay all the extortionate costs they have to just to import labourers from Europe). This will absorb a very small amount of labour.
But what about the other 70-odd% of labour? In a free market society, there would be hundreds of jobs that still need doing. I mean, I know my family would look to have a cook, gardener, driver, cleaner, but cannot currently afford them because labour is being pulled away in a million other directions. McDonald's always needs new cleaners, and I'm sure there are MANY jobs that Boston needs done but currently cannot. Hell, if it wasn't for all the interferences with licensing, fuel taxes, etc., somebody who just became unemployed could whack a "taxi" sign on the side of their car, and start driving around. Everybody benefits from this.
These are not fantastic jobs, but they would not be permenant, just long enough to keep people by until they retrain, or the demand for their current skills increase. And, even so, like I said, this would only happen extremely rarely, as sudden collapses just would not happen. The only industry where such a risk would be that great, in a free market society, would be the banking sector... and that's something that people training to enter the market would be aware of, such that there would be a lower supply, and thus greater wages, to accomodate the risk.
