Here’s an interesting video where Carrier (HVAC company) announces to their workers in Indianapolis that they’re moving the factory to Mexico.

I don’t know why they’d announce such a thing with more than a year’s warning. Those workers are now angry and likely to not put forth full effort. There could be a lot of factors I don’t know about, of course, but I would tell them at 5:00 the day they’re laid off.

Why is a Mexican workforce so much cheaper than an American workforce? Because the U.S. government puts all kinds of barriers in place for employers and employees. When, for example, government makes a law giving employees a new right, it just makes employees that much more expensive. Government has stepped into the relationship between employer and employee and dictated to both that the employer has to do X, and the employee must receive X. Neither has any choice in the matter.

The employee can’t opt to reject that benefit in order to be more competitive, or even to receive the benefit as a pay raise. That new benefit sounds good, but in reality, the employee is paying for it, or he’s pricing himself out of the market, and in the case of Carrier, the employee’s competitor is a Mexican.

Minimum wage is a more concrete example. In Seattle, the city has dictated that minimum wage is $15. The entry-level worker earning minimum wage may not be producing $15 worth of value for his employer. In that case, the entry-level guy will be laid off, and replaced with someone who can produce $15 or more worth of value. Or some company’s may be able to move out of Seattle, or some jobs can be replaced with computers, such as cashier jobs, where one cashier will monitor several self-checkout systems.

Raising the minimum wage sounds good, but it only hurts those who most need help. Furthermore, if raising it to $15/hour were a good idea, why not $20 or $50?

There are thousands of ways that government interferes in an evil way to price American workers out of the market. The only way for Americans to be competitive and get manufacturing jobs back is to get government out of the picture, and get them to stop meddling. B