McDonald's runs stores in France and Denmark

[jpgray]

There exist Walmarts in California. Starbucks has made its way to Sweden. In every case you will see service-centered industries do not avoid economies, local or international, in proportion to more exacting regulation, stricter environmental laws, higher taxes, or greater rights for labor. What seems to determine a service-centered industry's entrance into an economy is demand and wealth, with all of the former factors playing a supplemental role in that decision.

This is likewise true of medical technology and pharmaceuticals. Western Europe and Scandinavia made up 24.6% of Pfizer's sales, for example, with the US comprising 42.8%.

If we made some progress towards European standards of regulation, labor and environmental laws, lower health care costs, etc., is there much reason to believe there would be any appreciable flight from one of the largest consumer bases in the world for the service and medical industries?

Why is it then, do you think, that we so often hear of that risk as reason to deregulate or to deny ourselves the use of our purchasing power as a bargaining tool?

[Laelth]

1. True.

The argument that liberal policies hurt business is utter nonsense.

k&r

-Laelth

[Sarah Ibarruri]

2. Because the laws in this country put the mega-rich and corporations squarely in the governing seat

And American churches force people to be complacent, and go along with such bullshit.

If American churches disappeared, things would change very quickly.

[BlueMTexpat]

3. They also run their businesses very successfully in Switzerland.

Health care is employer-mandated, so they must provide it to their employees. Those employees also have decent paid vacation time and pension benefits.

And McDonald's business is booming there.

Wake up, America, there is no reason that the same policies cannot be successfully applied in the US, except that the RW tells you they can't be.

We have been sold such a mess of pottage.

[FarCenter]

4. It's not clear that French restaurant regulations are more onerous than the US'

Bring your dog into the restaurant? Of course...

France really has only the federal level of government and there ia more uniformity across the country.

[karnac]

5. Well, I did enjoy my 12 euro Big Mac meal in Tallin, Estonia last month

Thats about 17 dollars US. and the place was packed with poor estonians and not tourists like me.

While not a bad burger, just around the corner I got a better meal for almost half the price i the evening.

[proverbialwisdom]

6. Yeah, and it's not even real food.

http://www.cfr.org/health-science-and-technology/food-prices-global-instability/p24018

...What we're seeing is that the entire food supply of the world is now globalized, and there is no country on Earth that is entirely self-supporting. Everybody is importing and exporting. It is so fluid and so complicated, that at any given moment it is very difficult to say what countries were involved in every chain of what you consume.

A study done on a hamburger sold by a fast food chain in the United States that the ingredients came from fifty-four countries.

When you imagine processed food elements from ten or twelve countries, it how difficult it is, in this new globalizing world of food production, to guarantee the safety of anything. The challenge is now well beyond what any given country's regulatory agencies can handle. We really need to be thinking about entirely new kinds of global regimens and standards of safety for food, regardless of whether the consumer is in Nigeria, Argentina, or Los Angeles.

Tell me how a hamburger contains 54 ingredients, assuming only one ingredient per country cited.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Probably some ingredients come from several countries ...

beef might come from US, Canada, Australia, and various Latin American countries, and thus be counted multiple times.

I know beef from Central America is usually not feedlot-fattened, so has to be ground together with excess fat from US cattle to make hamburger of sufficiently high fat content.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

8. I think the Republicans are actually talking about China - although they won't actually say the name

When they say that the corporate tax rate in America is uncompetitive with the rest of the world, they are talking about China's low tax rate. When they lament the fact that American business can't compete with the rest of the world because of higher regulations, they are talking about China and its lower regulations. After all, China is our number one competitor and the number one foreign magnet for American business. They don't dare say that they would like the United States to become like China, but that's what they mean. Of course U.S. corporations could still make money in an environment such as Western Europe. But they can't gorge themselves the way they can in China.

They would love to loosen up environmental regulations and let us breath foul air such as what people have to breath in China. As an immigration attorney, I've been several times to Beijing and the air is pretty foul and elsewhere in China, the water is not something I would care to drink. The wages in China are low and people work very, very long hours each day, sometimes up to 7 days a week. Extended families live in one or two rooms in crampted conditions. Most Chinese live in modest apartments with no heat in winter and no air-conditioning in the summer. Buying a car in China is a major event, like buying a house in the U.S. Of course in the major tourist centers such as Beijing and Shanghai, there are luxurious hotels and suburban tracts. But if you go into the countryside or to large industrial cities such as Shandong beyond the tourist trek, you will see a very different China.

The average Chinese person has come a very long way since the days of Mao. But the wealth gap continues to widen in that country at an alarming rate. We don't hear about it in our media, but China has a great deal of social unrest these days, with bombings, killings, demonstrations, and riots because of the growing gap between rich and poor. The average American simply would not tolerate living the way an average Chinese person lives. Yet the Republicans would like the U.S. to model its corporate tax code and corporate regulatory scheme on China, although they don't dare pronounce that name. Instead of adopting what's good about China, some of their social safety net such as it is, the Republicans would have us adopt the bad aspects of China. They want a race to the bottom and for the work hours and pay of our citizens to go into decline to supposedly make us more competitive.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. Yup, the chain stores are all over the "socialist cesspools" of Scandinavia

I didn't see any WalMarts, but I saw plenty of McDonald's and Burger King and Starbucks.