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Companies don't have to buy from the lowest bidder. Apple could choose to support manufacturing in countries with better labor/environmental protections without any new laws.

I think border adjustments are also a good idea, but I won't give Apple a free pass for choosing to support such poor manufacturing conditions just to make more profit.




No, because then they'd get easily undercut by competition without such ethical scruples.

This is a tragedy of the commons problem, you need central enforcement.


Apple would get easily undercut by competitors with lower prices? Many have tried.

But yes, that could happen to other companies, which shows that consumers share responsibility for ignoring the labor and environmental conditions.


Consumers don't have any transparency into labor or environmental conditions. We can't even see a bill of materials for our products much less information on the labor or environmental conditions. The problem is systemic--the rules incentivize bad outcomes; litigating blame is pointless and distracting: fix the rules and move on.


That is not true. We all know China has poor environmental protections and low wages, and yet we choose to buy products made in China.

And the consumers who don't care are also voters who don't care, so the rules won't be fixed.

But a few powerful people could create huge changes all on their own. Holding them responsible is not pointless, it's our best hope for change.


> That is not true. We all know China has poor environmental protections and low wages, and yet we choose to buy products made in China.

It's 100% true, and we often buy from China because overwhelmingly there simply aren't alternatives, the alternatives are prohibitively difficult to find, the alternative is another developing country with similar labor and environmental policies, or the alternative is laundered through a country with good regulation (a car is "manufactured" in America but all of its components--the bulk of its value--are produced in developing countries without regulation).

> And those consumers are also voters. The rules won't be fixed because most people don't care either as consumers or as voters.

Right, but they don't have the same access to politicians that corporations do. This is a different and worse systemic problem. Moreover, corporations run campaigns to shift public opinion away from effectual policy. In the 70s bottling companies ran campaigns which argued, as you are arguing, that litter was a consumer problem rather than a industrial problem (e.g., the "crying Indian" advert). The cigarette industry ran a campaign that insisted that the high rate of home fires are caused by a deficiency of highly carcinogenic flame retardants in home furnishings. Similarly, the fossil fuel industry currently runs campaigns which seek to make climate change an issue of personal responsibility ("we don't need legislation, we just need consumers to decide to switch to veganism and give up their cars").

> But a few powerful people could create huge changes all on their own. Hold them responsible is not pointless, it's our best hope for change.

I strongly disagree. Our best hope for change is public policy, notably border adjustments. If you want to protest at Cupertino, be my guest but that's wholly inadequate.


Interesting examples. How'd they work out?

More disposable bottles and fossil fuels are sold now than ever before. You can still buy cigarettes, and they're still as poisonous and addictive as ever, but most people don't want to buy them anymore.

Public policy worked in 0/3 cases. Changing consumer behavior worked in 1/3.


Those weren’t public policies, they were marketing campaigns to divert away from reasonable public policy solutions.


They were also public policy goals that were not solved by public policy solutions.


No one here claimed that every problem has been solved by public policy.


You suggested that personal choice was just a distraction from policy-making, but one of your own examples, cigarettes, shows otherwise.

Personal choice works.


There was a national campaign against tobacco. Moreover, no one is accidentally buying cigarettes like they’re buying carbon. It’s not like cigarettes were added to every product in unknown quantities and the public managed to avoid purchasing them. Similarly, people can’t simply opt out of carbon—it’s not like people were previously waltzing up to the counter and asking for some carbon, and now they’re not doing it any more. If that’s your “personal responsibility” example, it’s pretty desperate.




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