Snapshot of a broken system: How a profitable company justifies laying off 1,400 people & moved their jobs to Mexico

Yep. When I was in college, both the lecturers and the students thought Milton Friedman was an asshole and a fraud. I was rather surprised to find when I got to the US that people thought he was clever. To be honest, they still haven't figured it out.

Snapshot of a broken system: How a profitable company justifies laying off 1,400 people & moved their jobs to Mexico

I dont even think it's Milton Friedman's fault -- it's not possible to argue against his contention that corporations have to be profitable.

NAFTA on the other hand makes it possible for companies like Carrier to move production to Mexico and then import their products without any tarriffs. That was an unintended consequence of the treaty, and should be addressed by looking at companies with US management but foreign production. There should be higher taxes on profits made outside US borders, like substantially higher.

richard09 wrote:

I was rather surprised to find when I got to the US that people thought he was clever.

The people who thought he was clever were the people who were profiting from his poorly-thought-out theories.

NoCoPilot wrote:

That was an unintended consequence of the treaty,

I think it was one of the primary reasons for NAFTA; not unintended, just not talked about in public.

NoCoPilot wrote:

I dont even think it's Milton Friedman's fault -- it's not possible to argue against his contention that corporations have to be profitable.

Certainly it's obvious that companies have to be profitable. It's not at all obvious that the only goal of any company is to increase share-holder value. And actually, it's not true, and behaving as though it were true is destructive in a number of ways, as the story illustrates.