Replies

Why hasn't that happened already? Why is India's method of "creating" their industry to have US companies essentially ship them ours?

Because American investors see money to be made by using India's labor and developing that country through a rise in their standard of living. Should we restrict investors/speculators from doing this? Should we not allow the freedom to invest in foreign business? Let me know, so that I can teach my kids to be stonemasons. They can help install the first stones of the foundation for America's own "Berlin Wall".

If others can use hyperbole, so can I.

Its actually very simple: India isn't doing this, because its hard to do.

Imagine if India had to make the massive investments needed to develop corporations from the ground up to compete with the dominant US companies in technology. Is their system capable of producing such ventures? Their government is a mess, they don't have the kind of legal or intellectual property apparatus that is capable of fostering such efforts. Could their system, even with their educated work force and lower costs, produce homegrown competitive industries against Cisco, and IBM, and HP, and Microsoft? It would be tough, perhaps impossible.

But what India can do successfully is allow US companies to stroll into town and setup these "sweat shop" style IT operations. And that is certainly much easier then the scenario above.

The idea that we are allowing US companies to offshore to take advantage of the lower costs to fend off competitive pressures from abroad would be acceptable, if you could tell me where these competitive pressures from foreign companies were. See any credit card companies from Calcutta making a big impact against AMEX in the USA? Any satellite TV companies from Bangalore competing against Direct TV?