HellNo wrote:
I bet most of the electronics you have were made in developing countries where there are about 20 starving people in a room
How can I go about replying to that?
The jobs that are outsourced to developing countries are usually why they aren't starving anymore, or at least starving less.
People always have a choice, to take whatever job is most beneficial to them. Work at fair market value brought into an areas helps lift it out of poverty. If people are still starving in those places, it's because there aren't enough electronics manufacturing jobs to feed them all, not because we gave them work.
Sudden changes in economic circumstances (like passing trade laws that force companies to pull out of developing countries and lay off the entire population), create starvation through economic disasters. This is bad legislation.
Excessive inflation can also do the same thing, which is why governments have to be careful, and work needs to be distributed and given at fair market value. Look at what happened in Japan.
It's also primarily
subsidies, not fair market work, that create economic issues that cause mass starvation. Another legislative issue. Like, for example, the U.S. subsidies on corn that put Mexican agricultural workers out of work because they could no longer compete with U.S. corn since the U.S. government was making it abnormally cheap, allowing it to be exported, and then crashing the Mexican agricultural economy.
Go to Mexico and ask people why they're homeless and have no work. It's not because they're lazy.
Giving people work is not a bad thing... unless you give it to them and then take it away suddenly and crash their economies, or give it to them at uncompetitive rates through subsidization (which is unstable).
It is precisely those low wages and relatively cheap/poor working conditions that make the work given to them stable and economically viable, which allows a gradual improvement in their economy that has staying power.
The issue is much more complicated than people imagine it to be.
For example, "Fair trade" is actually inflated trade through subsidy, and tends to cause more problems as unintended side-effects. Like, abnormally inflating the price of coffee in the market, causing
ALL of the farmers in the country to switch to growing coffee because they hear the price is so high, and then be unable to sell it because it isn't the true market price, but rather an unnaturally inflated price with a limited demand, and be left with tonnes of coffee they can't sell for a viable return because the market is now flooded, and with nothing to eat.
Yes, there are ways to avoid those problems, but those are things that real economists have to be concerned with when evaluating these issues.
Sorry, your friend is an idiot who doesn't understand the first thing about economics.
He needs to be schooled. But in order to school him, you may have to school yourself a bit first. Economics is a complicated topic.
But learn, understand, and use that Coffee example. It's a good place to start.
It was easier than I thought to turn vegan, but it was kinda strange when I realised I couldn't eat my top 5 favourite foods any more, ahha 
But we've known each other online for around a year I think.
