Free Republic

Is offshore outsourcing good or harmful for America? To convince Americans of outsourcing's benefits, corporate outsourcers sponsor misleading one-sided "studies." But very few people have looked objectively at the issue. These and the large number of Americans whose careers were destroyed by outsourcing have a different view of outsourcing's effect. But so far there has been no debate, just the shouting down of skeptics as "protectionists."

Is offshore outsourcing good or harmful for America? To convince Americans of outsourcing’s benefits, corporate outsourcers sponsor misleading one-sided "studies." Only a small handful of people have looked objectively at the issue. These few, and the large number of Americans whose careers have been destroyed by outsourcing, have a different view of outsourcing’s impact. But so far, there has been no debate, just a shouting down of skeptics as "protectionists." Now comes an important new book, Outsourcing America, published by the American Management Association. The authors, two brothers, Ron and Anil Hira, are experts on the subject. One is a...

In March, the U.S. economy created a paltry 111,000 private sector jobs, half the expected amount. Following a well-established pattern, U.S. job growth was concentrated in domestic services: waitresses and bartenders, construction, administrative and waste services, and health care and social assistance. In the 21st century, the U.S. economy has ceased to create jobs in knowledge industries or information technology (IT). It has been a long time since any jobs were created in export and import-competitive sectors. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts no change in the new pattern of U.S. payroll job growth. Outsourcing and offshore production have reduced...

How much longer can American prestige survive the embarrassments inflicted by President Bush? Bush’s demand that Syria immediately withdraw its troops from Lebanon is a ricochet demand. If Lebanon cannot have free elections while under foreign military occupation, how, asks the rest of the world, does Iraq have free elections when it is under U.S. military occupation? Bush’s latest guffaw-evoking bluster is the work of desperation. Every explanation and justification Bush has given for his ill-fated invasion of Iraq has proven false. There were no weapons of mass destruction. No terrorist links to Osama bin Laden. No WMD programs. The...

A country cannot be a superpower without a high-tech economy, and America’s high-tech economy is eroding as I write. The erosion began when U.S. corporations outsourced manufacturing. Today, many U.S. companies are little more than a brand name selling goods made in Asia. Corporate outsourcers and their apologists presented the loss of manufacturing capability as a positive development. Manufacturing, they said, was the "old economy," whose loss to Asia ensured Americans lower consumer prices and greater shareholder returns. The American future was in the "new economy" of high-tech knowledge jobs. This assertion became an article of faith. Few considered how...

Dennis Prager's wise words apply to this week's world Council of Churches decision to divest from Israel: I have argued in this column that the greatest sin is committing evil in God's name. As bad as the evil committed by secularists, such as communists and Nazis, has ever been, the most grievous evil is that which is committed in the name of God. For not only do religious evils harm their victims, they also do lasting damage to God-based morality, which those of us who believe in God and religion consider the only viable antidote to evil. That is why...

The U.S. economy is headed toward crisis, and the political leadership of the country – if it can be called leadership – is preoccupied with nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. The U.S. economy is failing. The afflictions are serious. They could be fatal even if diagnosed and treated. America is losing the purchasing power of its currency and its ability to create middle-class jobs. Story Continues Below The dollar's sharp decline and projections of continuing trade and budgetary red ink are undermining the dollar's role as reserve currency. A number of central banks have announced that...

Americans are being sold out on the jobs front. Americans' employment opportunities are declining as a result of corporate outsourcing of U.S. .jobs, H-1B visas that import foreigners to displace Americans in their own country, and federal guest worker programs President Bush and his Republican majority intend to legalize the aliens who hold down wages for construction companies and cleaning services. To stretch budgets, state and local governments bring in lower-paid foreign nurses and schoolteachers. To reduce costs, U.S. corporations outsource jobs abroad and use work visa programs to import foreign engineers and programmers. The U.S. job giveaway is explained...

Once upon a time there was a liberal media. It developed out of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Liberals believed that the private sector is the source of greed that must be restrained by government acting in the public interest. The liberals' mistake was to identify morality with government. Liberals had great suspicion of private power and insufficient suspicion of the power and inclination of government to do good. .... When the draft is reinstated, conservatives will loudly proclaim their pride that their sons, fathers, husbands and brothers are going to die for "our freedom." Not a single...

Americans have been betrayed. Sooner or later, Americans will realize that they have been led to defeat in a pointless war by political leaders whom they inattentively trusted. They have been misinformed by a sycophantic corporate media too mindful of advertising revenues to risk reporting truths branded unpatriotic by the propagandistic slogan, "you are with us or against us." What happens when Americans wake up to their betrayal? It is too late to be rescued from catastrophe in Iraq, but perhaps if Americans can understand how such a grand mistake was made they can avoid repeating it. In a forthcoming...

I remember when friends would excitedly telephone to report that Rush Limbaugh or G. Gordon Liddy had just read one of my syndicated columns over the air. That was before I became a critic of the US invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration, and the neoconservative ideologues who have seized control of the US government. America has blundered into a needless and dangerous war, and fully half of the country's population is enthusiastic. Many Christians think that war in the Middle East signals "end times" and that they are about to be wafted up to heaven. Many patriots think that,...

Generals fight the last war, and so do those who make foreign policy. American foreign policy is wedded to Western Europe by a half century of cold war and institutionalized in the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and various and sundry "Atlanticists." Yet, Europe has radically altered. No longer a quaint collection of historical enemies, Western Europe in its new guise as the European Community is a crypto-fascist state. The new class of international bureaucrats and lawyers who govern the new European state through regulations are no more politically accountable than was Adolf Hitler, and they enjoy media...

Is the Bush administration competent? There is enough information at hand on which to base an objective opinion. On the eve of President Bush's second term, the U.S. economy has fewer jobs than when Bush was inaugurated four years ago. During Bush's first term, the U.S. economy was unable to create jobs in both export and import-competitive sectors. The formerly powerful U.S. jobs machine has been allowed to run down to the point that jobs can only be created in nontradable domestic services. The service jobs that have been created are too few in number to offset the loss of...

President Ronald Reagan’s stature will grow as his achievements come to be more widely recognized. Few Americans realize that President Reagan’s economic policy won the cold war by rejuvenating capitalism. Members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, with whom I spoke in Moscow during the Soviet Union’s final months, agreed that it was President Reagan’s confidence in capitalism, not his defense buildup, that caused Soviet leaders to lose their confidence. Unlike many "Soviet experts" in the West, the Soviets themselves were aware of the failures of their economic system. Although their failing economy seemed impervious to reforms, the Soviets took...

Why do Americans who talk about freedom and democracy rely on coercion? The political left is all for coercion against the rich. Freedom and democracy mean taking the rich’s money and giving it to those who have a "right" to it. For conservatives, freedom and democracy issue forth from the barrels of our guns. National Review’s cover (May 3) proclaims: "To the Death, Crushing the insurgency, saving Iraq." The magazine’s conservative editors are too serious to see the irony, but polls show that Americans are appalled at the growing carnage. An April 28 CBS/New York Times poll found "just 32%,...

Clarifications on the Case for Free Trade by Paul Craig Roberts [Posted January 10, 2004] Free trade has necessary conditions. Today these conditions are not met. This point has escaped Joe Salerno and George Reisman (both writing on Mises.org), as it has a vast number of other people. The case for free trade is based on David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage. Ricardo addressed the question how trade could take place between country A and country B (England and Portugal in his example) if country B was more efficient in the production of tradable goods (cloth and wine in his example) than...

<p>Conservative pundits incautiously hail the 277,000 private-sector jobs created by the economy in March as the long-awaited "jobs turnaround." Alas, the Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll survey indicates a continued jobs malaise.</p> <p>A look at the composition of the 277,000 jobs reveals job growth in sectors that do not generate export earnings or face import competition. Construction accounted for 71,000 of the new jobs; retail 47,000; health care and social assistance 39,000; restaurants and bars 27,000; professional and technical services 27,000; administrative and waste services 17,000; repair, maintenance and laundry services 12,000; wholesale 11,000; warehousing and storage 7,000; logging and mining 7,000; financial activities 6,000; air transportation 3,000.</p>

For several years, I have been tracking U.S. job losses and seeking to understand the causes. I have written enough columns about this subject to have caused angst among some inside-the-Beltway think-tankers. Two critics, Bruce Bartlett and Daniel T. Griswold, have yet to comprehend the argument that they dispute. This is puzzling. Whereas international trade theory is very complex, my statement of the job-loss problem -- or more accurately, my posing of the question -- is very simple. Are the job losses that are everywhere in the news and the decline in U.S. manufacturing the result of competition in the...

Since January 2001, a three-year period during which the economy has experienced one year of recession and two years of recovery, the U.S. economy has lost 2.6 percent of its private-sector jobs. These losses are not evenly distributed. Construction employment has declined by only 0.1 percent, and employment in oil and gas extraction by 0.7 percent. Employment declines in manufacturing and knowledge jobs, however, have been dramatic. Tables prepared by Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services from government data show employment in primary metals down 24 percent; machinery 21.6 percent; computer and peripheral equipment 28 percent; communications equipment 38.8 percent;...

<p>Thanks to the movement of American jobs overseas, including well-paying jobs for engineers and computer programmers, "the United States will be a Third World country in 20 years," economist Paul Craig Roberts said at a Brookings Institution forum.</p> <p>If economists could condemn members of their profession for heresy, Paul Craig Roberts would probably be a candidate for excommunication. Few tenets, after all, are so widely shared among economics PhDs as the belief in the positive impact of free trade. Yet Roberts is publicly challenging that precept, and making waves doing so at a time when trade has leapt to the forefront of the nation's political debate.</p>