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While there are good arguments in Mr. Roberts piece, I'm not so pessimistic.

But your comment that we should use GATT, etc. to "not make others labor cheap" is ridiculous. Your solution is to raise the price of labor everywhere so the U.S. doesn't have to compete? Talk about anti-capitalism.

First, you can't do it. Second, those third world countries can't be compared to our economy when to them $20 a week is a fortune. If some American company went to some backwater in Indonesia and started paying $25,000 a year for workers, there would be riots in the streets against those new "rich people".

Having work in Mexico would keep the majority of illegals out. Thinking you can create jobs in Mexico by paying everyone like Americans would never work.

I'm no globalist and I want the U.S. to remain strong and I want the borders protected. But thinking that only a manufacturing job base will do that is short-sighted. Using the slight "Service industry" also is a cheap shot and discounts our financial, computing, legal, management, and teaching industries. And yes, they can be called industries.

By having politicians pick and choose industries is disasterous. If they had their way, Texas Instruments would be forced to still manufacture slide rules so as to provide some stupid assembly line job to someone at $25 an hour.

But I guess having some unionized Democrat voting person making $35 an hour plus overtime for anything over each four hour period (and after 35 years of work hasn't got a dollar to their name), 60 days off a year and full medical benefits and guaranteed 50 cent a can Coke in the machines, free lunches and education grants to their snotty kids, working in a steel mill that hasn't spent one dime on modernization since 1955 mostly due to government regulations, is the way to go.

So it's better we all pay $500-1000 more per car so 60,000 dinosaurs in Pennsylvania, rich with electoral votes, don't have to learn to save and retire or find another job?

That's sad. I've had many different jobs over my lifetime and I would never allow those constraints to stop me. I guess growing up poor Arkansas trash made me a little more resilient!

I grew up dirt poor, I am dirt poor; last year I made 9,000 dollars. And, I live in appalachia.

That doesn't prove a whole lot, but since you decided to play some class war, I'll just throw that in.

Look, I'm not arguing for trying to get everyone paying at the same rate as American workers. I will argue, forever, in fact, that workers get paid sh-- even in their own countries by these American companies, and countries like China, where most new investment is going, don't care a wit about fairness to the worker.

Anyway, we are losing our base and we are becoming a service economy, like it or not. Manufacturers rely on cheap labor, and the cheaper the better. By your logic, the only beneficiaries of this great "competition" which, you seem to think, is very fair, are the folks that own the companies. For those that work for, not own, companies, they get screwed. Factor in offseas wage competition, and you have what we're happening now. "Competition" has zero to do with it, unless you happen to own the means of production.

I'm sorry, but that's a terribly elitist position to take. And, countries have sued the US in the trade courts for far more ridiculous things than wages. I'm not asking for equal wages, I'm merely asking for standards similar to what workers here have in the US. Sorry to hurt your precious "competition" but that competition doesn't mean a hill of beans to someone without a job in Appalachia.

Or Arkansas.

We can deny the reality of the situation by blustering about saying "the US is the most powerful country in the world," etc., this "rah-rah" crap. The facts don't play out that way. Sure, CEOs benefit, but Americans get shafted. Paul Roberts was pretty clear about that.

And he's right.