Out-sourcing Goes Both Ways.

Only manufacturing goods worth anything? What good is a computer with no software, I ask you. I guess you can just look at it, but it will do you no real good. A CD player with no music? What I'm getting at, is manufactured goods need intellectual goods as much as intellectual goods need manufactured goods.

 

It is called "national self reliance" by the libertarian right, or "bioregionalism" by the environmentalist left.

All this proves is that the legal system is arranged to favor the holders of "intellectual property". The MPAA, RIAA, etc. own a lot of congresscritters and contribute a LOT of money to BOTH major political parties.

They have a legal monopoly on most of "popular culture".

My problem isn't so much with the trading/bartering of services between individuals, but the entire parasitic layer of commerce that both parties are de Facto forced to negotiate such transactions through, and those that make a profit arragning such transactions. Enron, for example, generated not a milliwatt of electricity, but simply bought and sold the product (labor)of others (and manipulated markets) at an outrageous profit. Same goes for most of Wall st., etc.

See previous answer re: bioregionalism. Shipping products worldwide from centralized production plants vs. local production/distribution simply isn't environmentally sustainable in many cases.

Perhaps not at the level of the average worker, but on a larger scale they certainly are.

Nope. Modern society pretty much makes that impossible. But I do the best I can with such things as I am capable of doing, and seek help from close friends with other stuff where possible. And I regularly help those friends with my "surplus skills" which they may require.

Why should we continue to push the world headlong past a point where all of human existence is controlled by a handful of corporate interests? That's where we are heading in critical areas like food production, public utilities, health care, etc.

 

You guys need to be a little more specific than "the shit hits the fan." What economic events, exactly, are you referring to? And if there was actually a demand for American-made manufacturing goods, why wouldn't manufacturing businesses be able to come back to the country? Allowing outsourcing doesn't mean telling manufacturing companies to stay out and never come back...

 

"Peak Oil" perhaps?, Or what about a sudden acceleration of global climate change?, A major global war?, Pandemic disease outbreak? China unpegs the Yuan from the Dollar and calls in all the US debt they are holding?

Sure, they could come back....eventually.

But in the short term (a generation or so), exactly who is going to do all those jobs, particularly what was termed "skilled labor"? With the downfall of manufacturing in this country, many of the required "skill sets" are no longer in high demand, and many of those who used to do them are now retired or dead. I am speaking about machinists, tool and die makers, millwrights, pipefitters, etc. All the people that you need to build a factory and keep it running IN ADDITION to the actual assembly line workers.

Many schools have eliminated "industrial arts" courses completely, and replaced them with classes better suited to the "service economy", like how to use the latest software package that will be obsolete in 6 months. So if we suddenly needed a whole bunch of machinists or welders or whatever, where the hell are they gonna come from?

 

Some of those things simply will not happen. None of those things will really require us to rebuild our manufacturing base.

If the demand suddenly existed for American-based manufacturing companies, it certainly would not take a generation for them to come back. It would take less than six months. Businesses follow the money.

If it DID take a generation, then the demand wouldn't be that high in the first place.

This demonstrates a remarkably short-sighted view of the economy. The industries we have/need now are not the industries we will have/need forever. Manufacturing is no different than any other industry that has been rendered obsolete by better technology. Why would there be a sudden demand for manufacturing in the information age, any more than there was a sudden demand for handmade products in the manufacturing age?

Allow the countries that are good at manufacturing take the manufacturing jobs, just like any other industry.

 

You are pretty much asserting the common view of mainstream economists that trade is a positive-sum game for all participants. This viewpoint was expounded by Adam Smith and, later, David Ricardo, who developed the theory of comparative advantage: that countries are best off producing what they are the most efficient at producing, in exchange for products or services from other countries in which they are most efficient.

Those opposed to free trade have been disproved so many times: they predicted robots would replace humans, that the Japanese would buy the U.S., and that NAFTA would negatively impact the U.S. economy.

Because the naysayers have been so wrong before, they are pretty much laughed at by the academics.

But I truly wonder: real life doesn't always follow what is predicted by a mathematical model. Before it was low-skill jobs being sent to Bangalore, but now it is white-collar jobs. According to Paul Craig Roberts, one of the few economists opposed to globalization, the new jobs being created in the place of the high-skilled ones going to poorer nations are not as good.

Many of the Third World nations are becoming much more sophisticated. Any advantages developed by Americans will be quickly seized upon by the seemingly endless supply of engineers, chemists, architects, scientists, etc. from Asia and Eastern Europe who are willing to do the same job for much cheaper. Back when Ricardo was writing, companies didn't jump from country to country as quickly as they can today.

Also not mentioned in these debates is that the government is subsidizing the corporations by allowing a certain influx of foreign workers into the country to work cheaper wages, as under the H-1B visa program. The quota allotted to these companies has been reduced in recent years, though.

While the academics say one thing, public opinion says another, and public opinion, which influences the politicians, carries a lot of weight. It will be interesting to see how things go in the coming years. It will certainly be painful for some people.

 

RE: What makes a great computer program inherently less valuable than a box of Oreos?

I think something you ought to consider is this: that a software program is something that is infinitely reproducible for almost no cost. Trading "intellectual property" for real goods has the very real danger of turning into a scenario in which physical goods become REALLY expensive (e.g. land, cars, gasoline etc) because we have all these copies of program X floating around that are supposedly equivalent to a tangible good.

I'm not saying software doesn't cost to create (I am a software engineer) nor that it doesn't have value. I'm just saying if the going rate is five copies of DOS to a bushel of wheat, I can simply reproduce my one-time effort hundreds of times, but that won't make more wheat - all it will do is mean that the intrinsic values of things versus the bartering rate will drop.

 

You are constantly trying to say that manufacturing has been "rendered obsolete", when this obviously isn't the case. Manufacturing is alive and well, and always will be as long as people need manufactured goods. The problem is that manufacturing has been moved to a handful of countries with pitiful wages and little to no environmental or safety standards.

US-based manufacturing didn't "die". IT WAS KILLED! Part of a deliberate effort to disenfranchise the working class, create quick profits for wealthy elites, and increase dependency on a handful of multinational corporations.

 

I'd be having an easier time finding a job if the job market were growing like that.....

 

RE: As long as the farming is getting done somewhere in the world, what's wrong with having most of the people working in the service sector?

Well, that assumes we're on good terms with those people. We basically decided to use petrochemical in our cars rather than hemp oil - so - I mean, so long as we basically keep going to war in the Middle East and saying how high when the Saudis say "jump" so what?

The American South had no manufacturing, just slaves. This worked well until the Northerners decided to stop selling them guns, and attacked. Not that I support the South, but there's something to be said for Rhett Butler's speech at the beginning of Gone with the Wind.

 

As for intellectual property selling quite nicely-

Not on the streets of Hong Kong, Singapore or India, mate.

 

A CBC story points up a couple more reasons why jobs are leaving the USA, an illiterate workforce and our ridiculous corporate health care system:

http://www.cbc.ca/cp/business/050630/b0630102.html

A relevant quote:

 

I still fail to see what all the fuss is about. To assume that these are "American" jobs going to other countries is really quite racist. It is to assume that Americans are somehow more entitled to these jobs than Asians just because your face is the same color as the CEO's face, or you speak the same language as the CEO, or you were born in the same area as the CEO.

I also find it amusing that the people who cry the loudest about outsourcing are the same people who claim that sweatshop companies should pay their workers American wages and give them American working conditions...without laying any of them off.

Put yourself in the position of the CEO of an American company. Assume you're like most CEOs, and your primary responsibility is to make as much money as possible for your company in an ethical way. You're faced with two alternatives: spend $10 million on labor in America or $1 million on labor in Indonesia. Why do you people believe that you would have some sort of moral obligation to pay an excessive amount for your labor? This kind of thinking absolutely boggles my mind.

 

Goodbye, Kabul/Kandahar. You JUST got off a temporary ban for multiple usernames in the same thread, so you go right back to doing the same shit?

You are now PERMANENTLY banned...

 

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ProfitsOverPeople_Chom.html

 

His posts are somewhat insightful tho.

 

Whatever, I'm done here. Your rules are idiotic, and it's ridiculous that you can enforce such pointless rules and still call this a "free speech forum" with a straight face. Rules against posting with multiple usernames in the same thread might be understandable if you didn't want people to pretend to be someone they weren't (it'd still be stupid, but it might be understandable). However, when my Kabul alias posted, listing the EXACT same location as Kandahar, with a signature quote from the EXACT same person, written in EXACTLY the same style, sporting EXACTLY the same opinions, with a user name very closely related to Kandahar, only an idiot would conclude that I was trying to deceive anyone about who I was (and I might add, I haven't posted as Kandahar since the ban was lifted). This rule is stupid, and you're more concerned with enforcing it for NO REASON than you are about free speech. God forbid you actually THINK about why the rule was implemented in the first place, and never mind that there are other posters who much more frequently and flagrantly abuse the rules.

But there are plenty of other political forums to go to, so I'll bid you all goodbye, and a heartfelt "fuck you" to Ellis.

It's been fun, guys.