Replies

The thing that isn't pretty is the economic fascism caused by the public/private partnerships the federal government established that started the outsourcing binge.

30 years ago you wouldn't have been able to find an American company eager to move its operations to a communist country. In fact, Americans used to find communism abhorrent.

In the early part of the 1990's the federal government began to use US taxpayer money to start to build the infrastructure in other countries with cheap labor pools. Countries like COMMUNIST china, and SOCIALIST democracy India received huge sums of money from USAID and the IMF and other taxpayer funded organizations to build highways, water transportation and storage networks,power grids and plants and hospitals.

This was the set up that was required for technology industries and manufacturing to move off shore.

Also, in the early part of the 1990's the government held a series of meeting with large corporations. The government, not in the spirit of free enterprise, but in the spirit of a fascistic partnership with business,began to trade favors to companies for moving offshore. The began to use US taxpayer dollars to guarantee that the companies would not suffer losses if in a communist country, their assets were taken over. Those guarantees come through OPIC for one, although tax incentives(i.e. social engineering) also provided reasons for corporations to move offshore.

Also in the early 1990's the decision was made by the federal government to cease and desist border enforcement and prosecution of employers hiring illegal workers. At the same time Congress was lobbied and it capitulated to demands to bring in more and more foreign workers on H1b visas. These 2 policies have had a significant impact on wages and employment benefits.

These policies, have successfully bereft the American people of a significant percentage of their wealth and employment prospects. This isn't because American companies freely decided to move their operations off shore, but because they were engineered into doing so by a host of federal politicians in bed with the global socialistic WTO and internationalist organizations like the World Bank and the OECD.

So Protagoras you are not talking about capitalism and freedom. You are actually extolling the virtues of a purely fascist system, where government and business partner, and free enterprise, a founding principle of the American experiment is squelched. This economic fascism has melted the greatest free economy in the world, into an inextricable mess with the largest communist economy in the world. Shame on us for allowing it to happen. Pity on our children because they are now beholden on communists to keep their economic future viable.

Sources:

Incremental Socialism --- A Glimpse of the Big Picture

But foundations and their allies are acutely aware that money and leftist intellectuals do not suffice. They have correctly concluded that the addition of a free market sounding "tool" is required to dupe legislators and unsuspecting citizens to "willingly" embrace socialism. That tool, known as public-private partnerships, is an arrangement which formed the backbone of the 1930s German and Italian economic model.(16) Even though the latter system (i.e., National Socialism) failed miserably, statists erroneously maintain that the repackaging of this ill-conceived system in free market Orwellian doublespeak will somehow make it work.

Preparing for the hybrid economy: the new world of public-private partnerships

Business Horizons, Nov-Dec, 1993 by Ernest Sternberg By the turn of the century, the United States will observe the coalescence of a trend that has been in the making for several decades: government and business--once the antithetical pillars of the economy--are combining to funnel their operations through hybrid "partnerships." Whether in technological research, worker training, agriculture, or international trade, decisions will be made through a variety of forums that are neither public nor private. There will be university-industry collaboration, military-industrial cooperation, industrial consortia in which public authority is implicitly transferred to nongovernmental groupings, and many other such nonclassifiable arrangements.

Howard's End: Lock Up The Silver!

The Prime Minister has invited key business leaders to an October forum with government ministers to build "working partnerships between stake holders and government." Time to again lock-up the nation's silver? John Howard writes. Across the world political leaders are talking about forging new public-private partnerships. This is the new era of re-invented government.

"Public-private partnership" are such benign words that most of us miss the point.

But Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Al Gore et al, are all spearheading a complete structural change of government through public-private partnerships.

Changing the global rulebook

Their findings and suggestions are radical, far-ranging, and geared to putting the final touches on a world government structure. Of course, they never use the phrase "government," preferring one of their own coinage: "governance." According to Ramphal and Ingvar Carlsson in their commission report, "Our Global Neighborhood," governance is "the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and co-operative action may be taken. It includes formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest."