[Mad Dawgg]

Where are the Wal-Mart Bashers and what do they think of this?

[Mad Dawgg]

Ping for your input

[MelBelle]

All I know is some lucky guy in India just got my computer support job three weeks ago. I am so happy for him! I try not to think about how nice it would have been to be able to keep our jobs in USA and the fact that I'm going to have a hell of at time finding another job in the IT field. Oh well, strike up another tick on the unemployement counter.

[A Vast RightWing Conspirator]

The problem is not WalMart. But, this individual is trying to suggest that our jobs 'migrate' to COMMUNIST China because Maryland is too much 'pro labor'. And this IS quite laughable.

We simply can't play by 'free market' rules with country that are either communist or protectionist or both (China is a case of 'both'). Well, actually we CAN play that way but... it's a stupid play and, as the trade imbalance shows, we are losing.

[George Frm Br00klyn Park]

MD, For several years now, the feds have been giving "incentives" for businesses to "invest overseas". Laws making "offshore investment" more lucrativefor individuals and businesses are guaranteed to move jobs offshore. About the only "job creation" in the U.S. of A. today is paid for by taxpayer money. Such things as "privatized" prisons {Work camps for the increasing number of nonviolent docile prisoners.Free Market my ass. Peace and love, George.

[1rudeboy]

bttt

[lelio]

The truth is the polar opposite; there literally are an infinite number of things that must be done.
Yes, like cleaning a rich guy's pool. Right now no one will do it for less than $10/hr, he's looking for some cheap labor!

it still is a comparative advantage and one cannot fault people for taking advantage of that situation.
That's the language of looters.

His main beef seems to be the term "exporting of jobs" as there's still something to do here. Using his line of thinking, a country that's all baristas is as healthy as one that's desiging a spacecraft. I don't think they are the same.

[Gary Boldwater]

Thanks to government regulation, employers in this country are forced to become "more efficient" - that is get more work done with less employees. Health care costs have skyrocketed (mine is up 30% this last year), administrative costs have gone up (essentially all this is is government compliance work), workmen's comp is up (generous benefits), insurance (tort reform anyone?) is up, etc ,etc. The actual cost of labor is down, the cost of having an employee is way up.
It's our own government that's costing us jobs and driving work overseas.

[Biblebelter]

The subtext here is not an economic one. It is political. Nationalism versus globalism is the issue which trumps mere economics. Any country which has the Declaration of Independence as its founding document must dearly cling to its sovereignity through nationalism. In theory there is something called economic nationalism although I cannot point to anywhere in this country where it is practiced. J.P. Morgan said a long time ago that what is good for General Motors is good for the country. Unfortunately, that is no longer an operative statement because we have very few large corporations which are not multi-nationals. That buffoon Nasser who was CEO of Ford was nearly able to run the company into the ground on just his watch. He stated that he was concerned about changing the "corporate culture." It would have been nice if he had been concerned about making a good product, turning a profit, and therefore responsibly protecting the interests of the stockholders and preserving the jobs of its employees. Corporate America needs to focus on how the strength of their company can serve the purpose of making a stronger nation. In a this ongoing experiment in a democratic form of government, the national interest must be upheld by corporations just as it must be upheld by individual citizens.

[JimRed]

...one can neither purchase nor sell a job...

Tell that one to Jersey politicians...

[B-Chan]

The root problem is the alienation of labor. As Chesterton correctly pointed out, our current economic system ought to be called "proletarianism" instead of "capitalism", since it depends on the existence of a proletariat (i.e. a vast class of persons who have nothing with which to produce income except their own labor). As long as the average person has to work at a job -- in other words, exchange his labor for money by working at a company he does not own -- we will see nothing but more job losses. Like it or not, labor is a commodity, and in a global market the laws of supply and demand will tend to drive wages down in each industry until that industry's labor costs reach their natural prices. And in a world full of Third-World peasants hungry for work, the natural price for labor in any given industry could be very low indeed.

Right now, the nations of the world are opening their economies, creating a global free market where capital (and the jobs it creates) is free to move wherever the cost of labor is lowest. The alternatives to this system are stark: we could try autarky, which would mean closing our borders to all international trade and becoming self-sufficient (I'm not sure if such a state of affairs is even possible); we could try protectionism -- tarriffs and the like -- which would ignite a global trade war; we could allow trade unions to bid up the price of domestic labor, which would only accelerate the process of exporting jobs; or we could institute a high federal minimum wage, which would tend to accelerate the process of importing illegal immigrants.

Or we could cut the Gordian knot and try addressing the root of the problem: the existence of a large class of people who own no capital and must trade their labor to live. This idea is the basis of Distributism, an economic theory advocated by Chesterton, Belloc and others about a century ago. Its thesis: the more widely distributed the capital within a given economy is, the more stable and just that economy will be. Distributism has nothing to do with the State ownership of capital, as advocated by Marx, et al.; instead, it champions private ownership of capital, in as wide a distribution as possible, via family-owned small businesses organized and regulated by trade guilds.

An economy which is largely composed of independent small business owners, each working for him/herself, instead of an economy largely composed of quasi-monopolistic global corporations, free to hire and fire propertyless workers at will -- which has more potential over the long term? I'm curious to see what FR readers think.

[HamiltonJay]

Whoever wrote this article is a complete idiot, exportation of jobs happens every day its not a myth. The minute a branch of work pays well, its not long before its exported overseas... IT is just the latest in a long line of this.

[Mr. K]

Walter Williams has a good take on theis 'trade devicit' buisness. You have a 100% 'trade deficit' with your local supermarket- they buy nothing back from you.

But you do get goods for your money, so what is the problem? They get money- we get goods in return.

[Cacique]

ping for your review

[A. Pole]

[...] To say that corporations simply are chasing after cheap labor is only partially correct, as there is more to successful capital investing than finding workers willing to toil for peanuts. If that were truly the case, as critics of the left and right are charging, then low-wage backwaters like Rwanda and Zimbabwe would receive the lion's share of investments from the West.[...]

The author is convinced that his readers are very stupid.

[dark_lord]

For many years, economics has been plagued with the "lump of jobs" fallacy in which it is believed there are only a limited amount of things to do and once they are done, people have no means of employment. The truth is the polar opposite; there literally are an infinite number of things that must be done. As Alchian and Allen have noted in their 1983 book Exchange and Production, the elimination of some tasks due to improved methods of productivity frees up scarce labor to do other things. That, they point out, is how an economy grows, a simple truth that seems to have escaped most of the economics profession.

This is correct only in an academic ivory tower. There may be an infinite number of things to do -- but only a small subset of things that people will pay money for. A Marxist might claim that value is in the labor. This is false. Equal time and skill might be expended to make pies out of dirt as out of apples -- but I assure you that the apple pie maker will make money and the dirt pie maker will not. Thus we see that the reason this "simple truth" seems to have escaped most of the economic profession is that most people in that profession are not as egocentrically ignorant as this pontificating buffoon.

[dark_lord]

(The current federal harassment of Martha Stewart is another example of this phenomenon in action. The economic meaning of this episode to other investors, entrepreneurs, and executives is that doing well in the United States will lead to one's being targeted by prosecutors and tort lawyers. The end result is less investment here, which ultimately means that Americans are wildly cheering themselves into a long-term condition of a lower standard of living.)

Silly me. I thought she got into trouble because she was given insider information to sell out, and she did. Since that is in fact illegal and has little to do with investors, entrepreneurs, and executives "doing well" I suspect that most investors, entrepreneurs, and executives who are doing well have little to fear from prosecutors. Nor do I expect most investors, entrepreneurs, and executives to look at the Martha Stewart situation and declare "Golly, I guess I'll just have to invest in Asia because insider trading is illegal in this country!"

[Paul Ross]

To say that corporations simply are chasing after cheap labor is only partially correct, as there is more to successful capital investing than finding workers willing to toil for peanuts.

I.e., it is only 99% correct!

[maui_hawaii]

bump thread for later comment.

In short there are parts I skimmed over that make this guy appear quite stupid.

I will expand on which parts later this evening.

[harpseal]

Facile and shallow analysis at best as the author presumes something even remotely akin to free trade exists. The author makes no mention of government subsidy of overseas investment. The author does not deal with the artificial currency maniupulations of other nations. The author does not deal with the guest workers in the USA in violation of our immigration laws because some have falsely sworn to a shortage of Americans able to fill the jobs.

[VadeRetro]

The eye-grabber title is that exporting jobs is a "myth." Cheap trick. The "myth" part comes from an argument from semantics reproduced in its entirety here:

The first and most important thing to point out here is that the phrase "exporting jobs" is a misnomer. A job is not a good, nor is it a service, so it cannot be imported or exported. Only goods can fit that terminology, and one can neither purchase nor sell a job, so to say that U.S. corporations are "exporting jobs" is at best to be using economic language in a sloppy and inaccurate way; at worst, it is yet another contribution to the Keynesian morass that pervades modern economic thinking. (One can exchange things like labor and capital, but neither of those are jobs. The term "job" is a formal designation we give to action associated with the creation of goods, but they are not goods themselves.)

So, what we think is happening is indeed happening, but we label it incorrectly so the label is a myth. (Grrrr!)

Speaking of myths, the title of this article is itself false advertising.

The bulk of the article insists that we tend to blame the wrong people for what is happening. I suppose we do, but that's no comfort.