But those jobs are parasitic. They don't create wealth; they simply provide the service of transferring wealth between consumers and producers. That's a valuable and necessary service, of course, but the fewer people it takes to provide the service--and the less they get paid--the better off our economy will be.
I never thought of manufacturing jobs as being parasitic, but I guess the loss of a job is never a bad thing until it's yours.
But what do you think happens to those people without jobs? They just don't vanish into thin air. 1. you pay for their support through higher taxes. 2. You pay for their ER visits. 3. You pay for their retraining.
Then there are the social costs. Loss of other businesses when those people don't spend money. Hay, I spent half of last year unemployed, thanks to IT outsourcing, and guess what: I bought damn little, along with my family. We didn't go to resturants and didn't go on trips, etc.
But I'm sure some Indian, in India, was going to resturants and creating other jobs in secondary industries for some other Indians.
Meanwhile, as businesses and factories close and people move, property values fall, tax income falls (which usually means more taxes or more government debt spending) and crime rises (which means more taxes for more police.) These are the costs that no one speaks of.
Oh and here's another cost that we shall all bear in the future: a stronger and revitalized left, especially the communists. Northern Italy already has a large communist movement because of outsourcing. Seems the Italians don't have the same credit margin we do for credit card debt, so they became poor much quicker.