we're going to have to simplify our lifestyles and learn to get along with the reduced infrastructure that goes with such an existence. I envision trailer-park towns surrounding old city cores and squatter colonies in the ruins of foreclosed suburbs. These people would scrape along by doing non-outsourceable service work when they can get it: upgrading disk drives, removing spyware, editing offshore-produced documentation to improve the English, cleaning gutters for CEOs. It would be feudalism with cellphones.
American small businesses find they can be more competitive by hiring Indians electronically. Some, like Willie Green, would advocate protectionism. OK, let's delve into that. Say we pass laws putting punitive taxes on corporations that offshore. Fine, those taxes get passed along to the shareholders and consumers as either lower dividends or higher prices.
Since all consumers SHOULD have a choice of what and when to buy we find that the higher prices offered by domestic corporations cease to become competitive when compared to the burgeoning manufacturers of the near and far east.
Taxes. Since the domestic corporations have a higher tax burden than those that export to the US we find that the higher prices offered by domestic corporations again cease to become competitive.
We pass more laws further restricting the globalization of our domestic businesses.
Pretty soon we are left to our own devices since most domestic corporations have left the US for foreign shores where capitalism is less restricted. Most of our GDP is service oriented and internal since we have isolated ourselves from the rest of the world.
We have a period of many years where wealth is not created in America because the large businesses have left and the small business can't compete with cheap black market imports and even if they do, they are taxed to the hilt and regulated to the nines.
We can isolate ourselves all we want but the rest of the world is not going to sit around and wait for America to get on its feet.
If we can't compete in the world as it is right now, today, here, then we might as well pack up our bag of goods and retire. There is no escaping it, there is no amount of protectionism that will "save" us, there is no amount of government action that can overcome the inevitable worldwide market of supply and demand.
Get over it. If you lost your job to outsourcing go back and read about the guy who lost his job making buggy whips. Take a lesson from him and get back in the game. Nobody owes you a job and unless you want totalitarian government nobody is going to give you one because "they care".
Great phrase, and scary but plausible prediction.