Lots of opinions on this subject. Interesting to read the posts and think about the different world-views the postings reflect. I just hosted a young fellow from Singapore/Malaysia here this week and we had some interesting discussions. Here are a few observations:
1) Wages in Asia are comparable to those in the USA in the 50's and 60's, and don't kid yourself, those folks are real happy to get those jobs.
2) A company in the USA today can't ignore international competition. If he doesn't keep his costs in line with the best costs available globally, someone will step in and take away all his customers with a lower cost product.
3) One thing that has changed in this equation from years ago is the ease of doing business globally. Advances in communication and transportation have made the world smaller so that most USA businesses have no choice but to compete on a global scale.
4) I can remember when I was a kid in the 60's and 70's, we had rock concerts to raise money for the starving people in India and Bangladesh, and mothers told you to clean your plate because people were starving in China (still not sure how my clean plate helped them, but I guess mothers don't have to be logical). Now, instead of sending them sacks of grain, we're exporting a lot of good paying jobs and they are developing a middle class. There's an old saying that "It's better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish." These exported jobs may cause painful displacements here, but at the same time, they are helping others have new opportunities that would have been unimaginable when I was a kid in school.
5) If we put protectionist tarriffs on a product like steel in this country, it may appear to help keep steel workers employed -- for awhile -- but ultimately a hundred or a thousand workers who build things with steel become less competitive selling their end-products in the world and when their business declines, you've hurt both them and the steel workers you were trying to help. Protectionism hurts - don't do it! It's like swatting the fly on your forehead with a .357 -- real bad idea!
6) Unions sure didn't help matters by excessively inflating wages (when did a union leader ever declare that the latest contract negotiation was so successful, that there was no more need for the union and they could now disband?). I suspect a lot of union workers in long hindsight would have been happy to have less inflation and fewer salary increases, but more jobs, if they could have realized the connectedness of all those things.
7) When I was a kid, Japan made nothing but (forgive the expression) "Jap Junk," yet who would say that of Sony, Honda, or Canon today? Now Japan has developed a middle class and a standard of living that is -- like ours -- too expensive to support with low productivity jobs. Japan is outsourcing those jobs to China and India too, just like we are.
8) One can imagine that China will one day develop a standard of living that competes with ours much as Japan has, though it will probably require that they reform their government. Not to mention countries like India, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, etc. Global trade is bringing people all over teh world out of poverty and into the modern age. It creates painful displacements, and has its share of abuses, but that's from the evil in men, not the economic mechanisms at work.
9) I would not be surprised to find, one day, that South America and even sub-Saharan Africa had become the "outsourcing destination" for manufacturing jobs. God knows they need help in just the way that Asia once did.
What can or should we do in the USA about all this:
1) We had better start teaching economics and capitalism in our schools for one thing. The schools from elementary through universities are packed with socialists and communists that cannot possibly understand the problems, much less offer any help with solutions. They have been indoctrinating several generations of Americans to be absolute idiots about economics, and then these people grow up to become voters. If we don't stem that tide, we're lost.
2) We need to get the government out of our pockets, and get them out of the business of keeping poor people impoverished and providing corporate welfare that institutionalizes uncompetitive businesses. These are really two sides of the same illness. Read John Stossel's "Give Me a Break" if you still believe the government isn't spending money they have no business spending.
3) We DESPARATELY need school choice, so that we can begin to improve our education system. Once again, unions, the teachers unions, are the main force standing in the way of fixing the problem. Small religious schools and home schoolers all over this country are routinely outperforming the education establishment on budgets that are a small fraction of what the government-run schools spend. And I don't mean they're doing a little bit better, I am talking about a vast difference.
4) We probably need to reform the immigrant worker mechanism in this country so that we can import competitive low cost labor without creating an immigration flood that our infrastructure cannot handle. The guest worker program that has been proposed has a lot going for it and may be a pretty good solution. The last thing we want to do is drive food production out of the country due to uncompetitive labor costs.
5) We need to restrain and roll back government interference with business at the same time that we stop government welfare for big business. We need to do both of these things to stimulate small businesses and make it easier for them to get started and be successful. If you have started a business in this country you know what a nightmare the taxation, licensing and regulation morass has become. It is enough to discourage you from even trying to get a business started. The legions of lawyers and tax people you need is ridiculous.
6) Small business is where most new jobs come from, and where most new innovation comes from. If we are going to compete globally, that is our greatest area of strength. Americans are inventive and innovative on a scale that dwarfs Asia and that they still marvel at. We need to set that free again like the first 150 years or so of this country's history.
7) We may need a reform of patent law that prevents people from patenting things they never intend to develop. It has become common to lock-up ideas by the hundreds of variations and in areas that the patent holderr has no interest in developing, merely to prevent others from using them. The trouble with this is that it seems to have gotten to a point that it impedes innnovation whereas the patent law was originally intended to reward and stimulate innovation. Certainly you should be able to own any idea intend to use, but maybe there should be some limits to ideas you can put a padlock on and allow to become dusty and useless.
Now, I know that much of what I've said will make someone angry, maybe several someone's, and I respect your right to be wrong, but please think twice about wasting your time or mine with personal attacks. You are free to express yourself any way you like within the limits of this forum's rules, but I've got a pretty big delete key on my keyboard, and if this doesn't substantially make sense to you, I am way to "closed minded" for you to waste your time or mine trying to change my mind.
Thanks! /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif
PS: Oh, and by the way: Yup, steel has gotten more expensive $12 for barstock 3/4" x 2" x 24". I sure wish we would let markets do their job so it wouldn't be so expensive and so we could have more US-made steel. But that's the tip of the tail on a real big dog that I don't have much control over. Let's see now, where did I put my 7018 welding rod...
