For the political take on this, I should note that while Bush has people like Snow and Mankiw out there running their sewers about how "good" outsourcing is to the economy and how happy everyone who has lost their job to outsourcing should be, Kerry is clobbering Bush over the head with this very same issue. In my state (one of the battleground, "must-win" states for Bush and Kerry), Kerry is running TV ads that absolutely cream Bush with this very message: Bush thinks sending your job overseas is a good thing. It's a lie, of course, and Kerry and the Rats won't make things any better, but the message is clear and it is hitting home with people: vote for Bush if you think outsourcing and losing your job is good.
I'll even toss this one into the pot. Suppose we get into a real snot-slinging, down-and-dirty, out-and-out world war and need to ramp up our supply of weapons and munitions? If most of our manufacturing capacity is in Asia and they decide to close the door on us, how much will we be able to affect the balance of the war if we run out of ammo or weapons systems? Don't kid yourselves, a LOT of our military weapons capability is now based in offshore manufacturing. Where do you think mosy of those ICs come from for the nifty new electronic devices they use come from?
A very salient point indeed. It is simply incomprehensible to me that those who advocate and extol the so-called "benefits" of offshoring the manufacturing and R&D infrastructure of the country fail to grasp a fundamental axiom of geopolitical/military strategy. And that is, the more dependent a nation becomes on outsiders for it's basic needs, the more vulnerable it becomes to conquest by siege. We've had a taste of this already in recent times, at least for those who can remember the "oil shock" of the 1970s. That was a siege of the economic variety. So the foreign suppliers decide to cut us off from their supply of raw material, and what do they care if it sends us into a devastating and enduring recession? Tough cookies for you. Now imagine that same principle extended to other areas besides crude oil, strategic materials like steel and aluminum, high-tech commodities like motherboards and disk drives, finished goods like aircraft and military hardware, or intellectual expertise like power systems design and maintenance. Having a sizable fraction of the crude oil supply cut off was a shock, but having almost everything else cut off would wipe us out. Then all the hamburger flippers and insurance salesmen and WalMart gladhanders in the world won't help us.