My former employer, Nokia which is a Finnish company, insourced a ton of high-tech jobs in the DFW area. And believe you me, no high school dropouts were among the number of those employed.
Also, it was high paying work I had there. Very high.
Posted on 05/27/2005 11:14:22 AM PDT by LowCountryJoe
(Viewpoint): Every so often we witness the meltdown of a public figure. Recall Nixon, Howard Dean's scream or boxer Mike Tyson's bite of an opponent's ear. CNN business anchor Lou Dobbs has been committing the journalistic equivalent of biting someone's ear off in public. The host of "Lou Dobbs Tonight" has transmogrified from serious reporter to hysterical mountebank over one pet issue: foreign job outsourcing.
He has joined the chorus decrying the trend of U.S. businesses moving some operations offshore to economize on labor.
So what's the problem? Doesn't business have a responsibility to enhance profits by using resources efficiently? Not according to Dobbsians. To them, getting such "cheap labor" is illegitimate, even unpatriotic. They apparently feel American business has an obligation to give charity jobs to uneconomic workers.
What's wrong with that? The Dobbs position is dispatched by metaphor: When the car was invented, thousands of buggy-whip industry employees lost their jobs. Should government have outlawed car manufacture 100 years ago? Automation in general has sent many assembly-line workers into unemployment lines. Should automation therefore be prohibited by regulation?
The answers are obvious. Technological advancement causes short-term pain along with greater long-term gain. Technology, as implemented by business, may produce short-run unemployment. But this effect is dwarfed by jobs created over the long run through improved productivity.
This "outsourcing" phenomenon embodies the same principle.
Business is motivated to secure low-cost labor resources. Often offshore workers serve this interest of U.S. firms. Yes, our corporations seek "cheap labor," in the pejorative locution. (Sometimes U.S. labor resources serve the same end for foreign producers. "Insourcing," anyone?)
Why not prohibit such a job-dislocating practice by law to preserve American jobs? Because that would be economically myopic. What would happen if offshore-outsourcing U.S. firms were no longer allowed to do that? Our hamstrung firms would no longer be competitive in world markets.
Those entities would then be forced to downsize or even go out of business, thereby eliminating many more jobs!
Also, foreign governments would retaliate, prohibiting outsourcing to the U.S.
Because the amount of U.S. job insourcing is much greater than the outsourcing (did you know that?), this would produce a further loss of U.S. jobs.
Yes, let us choke U.S. business out of business. It is the perfect liberal egalitarian remedy: Let all the formerly employed be equal in their unemployment and misery.
At least the Democrats would then have a higher unemployment rate to use as a wedge issue while making the world safe for French corporations.
Self-evident economics notwithstanding, Dobbs drones on, traducing our economy.
The whole U.S. economy? Yes, Dobbs' sensationalized list of outsourcing companies now numbers over a thousand! The ironic lesson is lost on him: If something means everything, it means nothing. Lou's litany of "Benedict Arnold" companies is a fair proxy for the whole private economy, so his point disintegrates into gibberish.
Anyway, the evidence says this is pretty much a nonissue. The proportion of 2003 U.S. job losses attributable to foreign outsourcing was only 1%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That is 1% of gross layoffs, not 1% of the labor force! This is why outsourcing is a small price to pay for the long-term bounty of efficiency and employment gains.
Another way of looking at it: In an average year our economy loses about 10 million jobs gross, of which around 100,000, or 1%, are due to outsourcing. So how can our country stay in business? Because the economy also creates 11.5 million jobs in an average year for a net gain of 1.5 million.
That frames the true perspective. Apparently, American business does pretty well for American labor.
Ironically, the offending party is the one that has recklessly slandered U.S. businesses that are merely performing their economic mission.
Dobbs has injudiciously alleged that numerous U.S. firms are "Benedict Arnolds" of the economy. This is just anti-free trade claptrap, and it could bring a new round of recessionary protectionism.
Ultimately, Dobbs is hoist on his own petard. If anyone is betraying our economy it is Dobbs, especially considering the damage his propaganda can do in terms of inducing erroneous public perceptions and, in turn, support for bad policy.
The sound you hear is onrushing overregulation, trade war and macroeconomic contraction. Perhaps you can think of other demagogues who railed against convenient domestic demons.
I suspect I speak for many former fans as I express the utmost disappointment in Dobbs, now exposed as a modern-day subversive in the Benedict Arnold tradition.
Nonsense. The conservative position is the position of Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lincoln, Mellon, Carnegie, Rockefeller, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, right up to Hoover who would have looked at free trade policies as the height of insanity.
My former employer, Nokia which is a Finnish company, insourced a ton of high-tech jobs in the DFW area. And believe you me, no high school dropouts were among the number of those employed.
Also, it was high paying work I had there. Very high.
You did.
I just want to fight fire with fire.
Oh, a trade war. More "conservative" principles.
I recommend economics books and courses. Good luck.
Nonsense
Where did you get this peculiar notion that there is anything in the least conservative about globalist free trade ? Teddy Roosevelt sure would get a kick out of that one.
You can only defend your "argument" by twisting austinite's words and feigning erudition.
Teddy Roosevelt was a buffoon. Just like his commie cousin.
Go back to the DU web site where you belong.
Richard Speck was a protectionist.
No Blood for Oil!
"Adolf Hitler was a globalist, remember the third Reich thing and WWII."
Actually, Hitler was aiming for German economic autarchy--the exact same thing you espouse. So, if you're going to play guilt by association...you're obviously a Nazi.
"Marx was a free traitor."
Only because he believed that it would provoke the glorious worker's revolution. (It didn't.)
"You have good company."
Yeah, the company I keep actually knows what they're talking about.
Tell me about what buffoons Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, McKinley, Taft, Hoover, protectionists to a man were ? Free trade is not in the least conservative. It is a kind of globalist utopianism more akin to Marxism in its transnationalist loyalties, its elitism and its willingess to sacrifice others to its textbook theory of how the perfect world should work.
We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity for your -- what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy; therefore we shall call it your practice -- your practice without theory and without principle.
We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the Sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us [1].
We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds -- in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.
Notes:
[1] A reference to Britain's reputation as a foggy island.
Prove that.
How many Peugeot's were built in Vichy France 1942-1944?
Only because he believed that it would provoke the glorious worker's revolution
It didn't work then (mid 1800's) becuase no country was crazy enough to try this totally insane trade imbalance we have going on now. This is a work in progress and nobody has any idea how this will play out. All I know is the policies of Washington thru Hoover made us the strongest nation in the world.
It's not illegal. Fine.
Stephen Roach says, "the private sector wage-income generating capacity of the US economy remains woefully deficient -- only about a 5% cumulative increase (in real terms) 40 months into this recovery versus 15% gains, on average, over comparable periods in the preceding five cycles. "
In a ten-plus trillion dollar economy that's a lot of consumin' that ain't going on. Just how "cheap" are those Chinese doodads?
It is the wont of Mr. Roach's critics to call him names and move on. Does anyone have anything substantive for a change?
Offshoring is only part of the problem, BTW. Another part is companies are reluctant so far to ramp up as usual owing in part to what they spent on technology a few years ago.
"Prove that."
Reread Mein Kampf--he made it clear that he wanted Germany to be self-sufficient in all things from raw materials to finished goods.
And we've been circling the crapper since 1933. Stop it, you're killing me! [hoot]
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