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Externalities are a very valid point, and one I am sympathetic to in some cases, if the case is actually made that the externalities exist and are not being addressed. However, KMC's statement was
That does not sound to me like an argument about societal costs and benefits.
I assumed that KMC was actually a member of society and that the "bad for me" part was referring to him taking on his share of the societal consequences, as the pain and externalities aren't evenly distributed (if you're the person who gets to pay slave wages and ignore worker protection laws you don't really notice the costs that you're imposing on other people).
Ah, I read it as "bad for me (personally, because it will lower my wage personally)".
And likewise if you buy products where part of the supply chain of that product involved the labor of people who do not receive the pay or worker protections that American workers receive, you don't notice those costs, but you do benefit from the reduced prices. And if the labor involved was voluntary, I think that's basically fine.
That is in fact one of the ways in which those externalities manifest in daily life, and an extremely objectionable one too. It also impacts housing costs, infrastructure maintenance (and hence either increased taxes or degradations in service), etc. I don't think there's any real incompatibilities here - these things are bad for him personally because the costs are spread across the entirety of society while the benefits largely accrue to an already privileged(in the actual sense of the word, not the woke one) few.
Actually, in a lot of cases, you do. There's a very strong cultural perception (and one that matches to my lived experience) that a lot of items manufactured in China are substantially inferior in quality to (more expensive) equivalents that were made locally in the past. But at the same time I think your argument here has some extremely nasty consequences. To take the same principles and apply them at a different scale...
"If you smoke heroin then you're probably not going to notice the costs associated with becoming a heroin addict, but you do benefit from the reduced anxiety and increased happiness."
Ignoring long-term consequences of your actions because the immediate payoff is big and the negative consequences are small and gradual is not, in my opinion at least, a worthwhile strategy. Did you notice how much of Trump's rhetoric focused on these particular issues? Those policies, despite allowing people to benefit from the price-savings associated with labour conditions so bad that the factories have to install anti-suicide nets, have had such a dramatic hollowing-out effect on the economy that Donald Trump was able to ride the resulting resentment all the way to the white house. You can draw an incredibly direct line from the encouragement of outsourcing and illegal immigration to the Trump presidency, and that line also passes through the current (and in my opinion dysfunctional) levels of political polarisation in American society.
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