Most importantly, for the consumer. Understand that while some are laborers, some are managers, some are technicians, some are investors ... EVERYONE is a consumer.
If stereos can be made cheaper in Korea than in California, it makes no sense to get upset about the "loss" of stereo-making jobs in California: What we save on stereos can be saved, or invested, or spent on food. A savings is a savings, and thus the market favors efficiency.
American workers were once the most efficient in the world. If we are no longer so efficient, it is our fault, not the world's fault. But, of course, we are extremely efficient -- in aerospace technology, software development, biotech, and so forth.
The weird thing is, so many Americans are griping about the loss of assembly-line manufacturing jobs, but young Americans don't actually want those jobs anymore. More than half of U.S. high-school grads now enroll in college; they're not pursuing bachelor's degrees so they can run a drill press all day! In the textile and carpet mills of the South, factories are importing Mexican labor for the simple reason that young kids in the mill towns don't want to work in the mill.
American kids want white-college office jobs; they associate blue-collar work with immigrants, ghetto minorities and "losers." I'm just explaining the facts, OK? In the typical American high school today, students recognize the existence of two large social classes -- those who will go on to college, and "losers" whose future is often described as "you want fries with that?" Ask any teacher: kids today don't know the "dignity of labor" from the Treaty of Paris. It's all about the Benjamins, see? Kids today are extremely status-conscious, and the smart kids don't want anything to do with a job in a steel mill or an auto plant. They want "cool" jobs like they see on TV sitcoms, where folks wear cool clothes in cool offices and have cool conversations with their cool buddies.
So don't beat me over the head with your economic nostalgia and tell me how you're going to bring back all those wonderful smokestack industries, where square-jawed laborers carried their lunch-pails to the factory and punched the time clock and voted like the union bosses told 'em to vote. That whole Archie Bunker America is gone, and it ain't coming back for the simple reason that American workers don't want it back.
You can kill the messenger all you want, but the message is still true.
Ah Yes. I do occassionally encounter a venonmous response from those hate the manufacturing economy. Many of them suscribe to the old hippie philosophy, that someone else will provide all the things that make civilized society possible. My experience tells me otherwise.
I live in the manufacturing belt and life is good, and it is good for all that are willing to get up and produce something of value from raw materials. I've lived and seen what happens to an economy that dismantles manufacturing for a central planned high tech and global trade economy. CA for example. You get a two tiered society infested with gangs, drugs, and crime. Every person is not cut out for life in a cubicle, and these get left out.
The economists that advocated this condemed 25% of the population to a life of poverty and crime. Imagine living in a place with no fences, no gate guards, no helicopters orbiting over your roof top at all hours. I still do but I had to leave your globalization utopia to make it happen.