There were some smart free-market thinkers back in the 90’s who warned us about the danger of shipping our jobs overseas to take advantage of extremely cheap labor. (Sir James Goldsmith and Ross Perot)
Notice that when Romney and Obama talk about creating jobs, they are NOT talking about creating good jobs. We are at a turning point in American history. Middle class jobs are on the decline. Unemployment, and underemployment has been at high marks, and aren’t going down. College graduates are unable to get decent jobs. American standard of living is on the decline.
At one point I thought it was fair to ship the jobs overseas because we were creating a middle class and enriching the factory workers overseas. This is not the case. The problem is that these factory works are making something like $2 per day. We will never enrich the poor overseas enough because these factories are in areas where there are millions of poor workers. The factory operators are getting wealthy, but the workers will never get out of poverty.
One more point: We Americans can choose to pay for our social net in one of two ways: 1) keep jobs at home (or in areas that fairly compete) so that we have a strong middle class who can support themselves and provide wealth to the system, or 2) buy cheap crap based on overseas slave labor and pay out more and more in the form of taxes to support the crumbling society outright. In the later case, the whole system eventually collapses.
Two excellent sources of information about this subject:
Dan Carlin’s Common Sense Podcast #236 “Trapped by the Inflexible Mind”
and
Good column, I agree: https://www.change.org/petitions/president-s-economic-recovery-advisory-board-admit-sir-james-goldsmith-was-correct-on-the-charlie-rose-show-11-15-94
You make some good points. Save a little now and pay later, or suck it up and build the infrastructure that we need to move forward. I vote with building our own communities.
Well, I’ll probably avoid the ‘move forward’ reference myself, but we are on a path to destruction. We have to keep our middle class intact, or we will all suffer.