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« on: July 10, 2007, 07:36:35 PM »
This is selfish, protectionist, and hypocritical.
Let's compare shipping to another industry to see why: Imagine a situation where European consumers are only allowed to buy goods (clothes, perhaps, or electronics) made locally, instead of buying ones made in China. This is the same as your ideal that we should force ships to be crewed by the most expensive workers. What happens in this comparison? Well, as price signals are hidden behind protectionist laws, incomes will decrease (because workers who wouldn't normally make clothes/electronics are moving to suboptimal jobs &c). Also, costs of goods will increase very much (for obvious reasons). Consequently, workers are a lot worse off, with the exception of anyone who (a) gets a job making the protected goods, and (b) couldn't get a better job elsewhere in a free market. Subsidising this handful of people might sound worthy, but it's not worthy enough to justify the effects on everyone else.
Anyway, back to shipping. Presumably you'd like these native workers to be paid higher wages but still reap the benefits of globalisation elsewhere? These workers would still like to spend their extra pay on cheap goods & services from outside the EU, rather than be forced to spend much more money on a smaller range of goods & services made locally. Presumably you'd like other people to continue buying goods & services from cheaper places too, to keep the ships running, right? This is pure hypocrisy.
Business owners who act in their own interest, lowering prices to offer a service to many more people, are not bandits.
Before you call them bandits, have a look around you; look at the goods in your house and the services you consume. If you paid a huge premium to get them from local workers, then at least your argument is consistent. I think it's much more likely that, like everyone else, you wear clothes made in Thailand from Chinese fabric, use a Taiwanese computer with software written by people all around the world, &c - if so, you too are a "bandit", and your argument is hypocritical.
Surely the shipping industry, of all industries, recognises how much it's gained from free trade and deregulation in the past? It's not the 18th century any more - nobody who understands the subject really believes that trade is a zero-sum game.