Posted in Economics & Globalization, Politics & Public Policy, Technology & Science, tagged $2 dollar a day, American Dream, American way, Arab Spring, Australia, badmouth, candidate, character defect, community, competitive, Comptroller, consumer price index, consumers, country, crisis, culprits, David Walker, debt, deficit, democracy, Democrats, dialog, direction, division, Dong Tao, easy target, Economics & Globalization, efficient, election, emerging power, entitlement class, Europe, family, finance, financial aid, First World, free trade, fundraiser, future, gina rinehart, have nots, haves, help, incomes, individualism, insolvency, jobs, labor, lazy, living standards, low pay, middle class, minimum wage, Mitt Romney, money, nation, partisans, policy, political will, president, profits, pundits, questions, race to the bottom, raise all boats, real inflation, recession, Reform, regulations, resentment, scapegoat, solution, stand together, sustainable, Technology & Science, Third World, threaten, trade for a new century, unemployment, unsustainable, USA, voters, wage loss, Wall Street, welfare state, West, whining, work, workforce, world markets on September 20, 2012|
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She’s the world’s wealthiest woman you’ve never heard of and she’s saying something you probably wish you hadn’t: “Gina Rinehart, world’s richest woman, makes case for $2-a-day pay“,the Los Angeles Times reports.
The Australian mining heiress has a problem. The cost of running a mining operation in Australia cannot compete with Africans willing to work a continent away for $2 per day.
There’s a certain elementary logic to Rinehart’s argument. If the two nations are selling raw materials at vastly different prices because of vastly different costs of labor, her operation loses. In a worse-case scenario, it might not even make sense to go on operating. From Rinehart’s perspective, profit is the objective and benevolence is a job — never mind if the jobs she creates fails to compensate workers well enough to keep the lights on. She’s precariously positioned on that slippery slope so common to today’s political and trade debates: It could be worse: no jobs.
The world’s richest woman has a point. But it doesn’t pass the sustainable-future test.
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