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To: phil_will1
While in the short run, the transition was painful for Massachusetts textile workers, they soon found better jobs in new industries.

Writers on this topic keep spewing this comment. They fail to observe that the outsourced jobs are in the new industries. None of them has managed to point to what "new" industries are prepared to employ the 4,000 to 6,000 people who get dumped on the street each day. They were not making buggy whips. They were employed at the forefront of technology. Most have 4 year degrees and many years of experience.

8 posted on 02/17/2004 6:00:21 PM PST by Myrddin
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To: Myrddin
RE: "Writers on this topic keep spewing this comment. They fail to observe that the outsourced jobs are in the new industries. None of them has managed to point to what "new" industries are prepared to employ the 4,000 to 6,000 people who get dumped on the street each day. They were not making buggy whips. They were employed at the forefront of technology. Most have 4 year degrees and many years of experience."

That's an excellent point.

Many losing their jobs, I might add, are refugees from factory offshoring who retrained for the promise of better jobs. Now combine the quote from above with a post from another thread. To wit,

"The offshoring model in fact is the opposite of free trade. It is not trade at all but labor arbitrage. Unlike real arbitrage, the act of exploiting the wage differences is not ending the arbitrage opportunity. US companies create captive offshore centers in which the local employees are used to fulfill demand in the US while their wages are kept isolated from that same world demand."

See also the writings of Stephen Roach.

This ain't your great-grandfather's Ricardo. This is about a glut of readily available cheap labor worldwide and IMO is more akin to 19th century capitalism instead of comparative advantages among free trading countries. Fine.

There's also the those pesky "capitalists" depending upon tax supported Ex-IM Bank, OPIC, special programs, etc. Not so fine, IMO. But it's a riot hearing free traders complain about government "interfering" with capitalism when their pocketbooks are threatened. "Capitalism" has come to mean always having government money there if and when a capitalist needs it? Hands off! everybody else?

RE: "Few of the rockets that put the satellites into orbit were privately financed by the companies that now exploit them."

That's another taxpayer service, all the risks and R&D that built the rockets and facilities. BTW, I thought most of what makes cross-border IT-enabled services possible was the cheap underseas bandwidth.

25 posted on 02/17/2004 10:07:31 PM PST by WilliamofCarmichael (Benedict Arnold was a hero for both sides in the same war, too!)
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To: Myrddin
None of them has managed to point to what "new" industries are prepared to employ the 4,000 to 6,000 people who get dumped on the street each day.

Well we made the same point when factories were going bust. And those folks got jobs didn't they? Well time moves on..
50 posted on 02/18/2004 6:16:42 AM PST by Outsourcing=Competition
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