Excellent post. And the flip side of that is that even if protectionist measures increased the cost of domestically produced textiles (for example) the point where employers could pay textile workers even the minimum wage, most such textiles would be produced in highly automated factories providing only a fraction of the jobs of their predecessors, and most of those would be semi/ highly skilled jobs for which displaced American textile workers are not qualified.
My wife is a mid-level manager at a “US” F100 company which has been rapidly outsourcing increasingly skilled work for a decade. Increasingly, she communicates internationally with other managers in her area at approximately her level of responsibility via teleconferencing and similar techniques, and they in turn are increasingly “managed” by the same methods.
It’s very clear to people at her level that as the company becomes increasing international the next step is to start outsourcing the work of the next two layers of management above her - basically, the people who been directing the outsourcing efforts!
These people - who are at the lowest level of the corporate hierarchy were you start to receive really lavish rewards - are just starting to wake up to the fact that *they* in turn are subject to having their functions outsourced to highly competent executives (mostly Indian, in this case) who work for perhaps 25% were 30% of the total compensation packages of their US counterparts.
I’m pretty cynical about the extent to which our elected representatives and the people who are their major contributors care about the current loss of jobs to outsourcing - but the consensus seems to be that the majority of upper-middle-class jobs in this country are outsourceable over the next 20 years, and I’ve seen estimates that it may be as high as 70%.
And when *those* people start losing their jobs in large numbers, politicians are going to have to start paying attention.