Immigration
What if labour was treated exactly the way capital is?
All the social crises in the US and Europe are typically blamed on immigration. Immigrants are the reason people are not prosperous. If only immigrants did not exist, every American would be engaged in cleaning toilets, picking farms and on the way to becoming a millionaire.
There is also an argument which says that free markets solve all problems. Perhaps, but when that principle is unequally applied, you get crises.
In the 1700s, labour was very expensive in the US. If a landowner paid labour poorly, they could shift westwards, occupy Indian land and start farming. The West was so expansive that there was no limit to how far you could go. It was a free market.
Today, we have an economy where governments fall over themselves trying to create capital mobility while restricting labour mobility. In business, goods are also a form of capital known as inventory. Governments want goods and money to move freely while preventing people from doing so.
If capital can go anywhere, so should labour be able to. The passport was introduced after the First World War to prevent that.
Say capital were not allowed to move about freely, then American money would have to be invested in America. Immigration or not, this would send wages skyrocketing since a lot of capital would be chasing a limited labour pool. Outsourcing would not be possible in the manner in which it is practised today. Without Appleās capital infusion, Hon Hai could not have erected the kind of assembly plants that they did.
This inequity of the treatment of capital and labour is at the heart of the societal inequities.