What if China had hoarded all that cheap labor?

I wasn't going to do an econ/political (call it non-financial-market) blog this morning, but in the course of my weekend routine of assessing the present state of the financial markets (at the moment, reading up on the prospects for natural gas going forward) this thought came to mind: What if the Chinese, with all their capacity to produce ... well, just peek under a few of your household items ... had decided to hoard the production from all of their cheap labor for themselves? Not that you should be ready to up and move the family to China, but, ask yourself, would the average Chinese citizen be better or worse off than he/she is today? Would, for that matter, the average American? If you can honestly, in either case, say "better", please shoot me an email stating as much and I'll send you enough literature---citing the contrary-to-your-misconception empirical evidence---to keep you busy reading for a very very long time.

As for the rest of you, know that any effort among policymakers to hoard natural gas---to, that is, keep American producers from exporting to the world market---is nothing more than their effort to please their political supporters at your expense. As I suggested in the following:

No More Exporting Acetone

Utterly Idiotic Protectionism 

Lines Drawn on Maps are Entirely Insignificant