> TSMC was never in North America, it was always a Taiwanese company.
This isn't about a particular company, it's an industry-wide trend. Semiconductor manufacturing was predominantly in the US, then it wasn't.
> The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that it has no labor or environmental laws is somewhere between racist and naive.
This is actually the root of the problem. The problem isn't the existence of labor or environmental laws, it's that many labor and environmental laws exist in the US that can't survive a cost benefit analysis, so the US loses manufacturing to countries with a more efficient regulatory environment.
People act like regulation is some binary thing where the only choices are "on" or "off" when the reality is that the details are what matter.
The article is about a specific company. People are commenting with generalizations that don't apply to TSMC and so it is rather unclear how these comments are on topic. The comments also don't acknowledge that they don't apply to the specific context of the article which makes them misleading and in need of correction.
It is not necessary for the labor and environmental laws to be such that they "can't survive a cost benefit analysis" for them to create a force pushing manufacturing towards places without those laws. Any regulation will have this effect, and the details you speak of determine the degree.
> Any regulation will have this effect, and the details you speak of determine the degree.
There's more to it than that.
The ban on leaded gasoline makes gasoline somewhat more expensive. If you multiply that by all the unleaded gasoline everybody has bought since the 1970s, that's a lot of money! But lead is really, really, really bad. That ban is cost effective even if it costs billions of dollars. Which it does, but the alternative is much worse.
There are other regulations that cost just as much and provide nowhere near the same benefit. The deterrent effect on doing business in the US of both regulations is the same, but the benefit we receive isn't.
And the deterrent is cumulative. There are advantages to doing business in the US. An educated workforce and a stable government etc. Companies move out when the cumulative regulatory deterrent exceeds the advantages.
Which means you can have a ban on leaded gasoline without anyone leaving, because the cost of that doesn't exceed the other advantages of the US. Which means that anyone trying to repeal the ban on leaded gasoline is doing it wrong.
But if you have a ban on leaded gasoline and 250,000 other regulations that each cost just as much but are barely breakeven if that on the benefit side, you exceed the threshold and lose the jobs. To get the jobs back, you have to get rid of some of the regulations.
We need to get rid of the ones with a poor cost benefit ratio, not the ones with a great cost benefit ratio. Which is, to be honest, most of them -- but it's still really important that it be the right ones.
Every regulation (that isn't globally applied/enforced (so all of them)) creates a regulatory deterrent (where it is applied/enforced), independently of its benefit. This is what I said, and this is also implicit in your comment.
The advantages of doing business in the US that are balanced against "cumulative regulatory deterrent" are largely independent of the specific regulations involved, though not always (much harder to get an educated workforce when everyone is lead-poisoned in childhood). Deciding which costs should be considered baked in (you're saying "no leaded gasoline") and which are on the margin (you're saying whichever 250,000 you claim are as costly as no leaded gasoline) is not inherent to the problem based on "efficiency" alone.
"Benefit" is rarely neutral. Values and politics are its domain. ("It's your luggage that has put the plane over its weight threshold, not my luggage!")
Also,
> To get the jobs back, you have to get rid of some of the regulations.
presumes that other countries' regulatory environments are functionally fixed and not impacted by international cooperation. International effort imposed extra costs on those who would employ child labor, for instance. Other types of responses exist besides "well we have to let them give Kentuckian factory-workers spinal problems because otherwise they'll go off and give Vietnamese factory-workers spinal problems!"
This isn't about a particular company, it's an industry-wide trend. Semiconductor manufacturing was predominantly in the US, then it wasn't.
> The work culture is no doubt different (as it is, say, in Japan or South Korea), but to pretend that it has no labor or environmental laws is somewhere between racist and naive.
This is actually the root of the problem. The problem isn't the existence of labor or environmental laws, it's that many labor and environmental laws exist in the US that can't survive a cost benefit analysis, so the US loses manufacturing to countries with a more efficient regulatory environment.
People act like regulation is some binary thing where the only choices are "on" or "off" when the reality is that the details are what matter.
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