Government links few layoffs to offshoring

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Outsourcing helps the world

What's always overlooked in the debate is that there are fantastic long-term benefits to outsourcing. Outsourcing brings wealth, political reform, environmental protection, and peace to the world.

It's easy to forget, in our middle-class town, that much of the world lives in grinding poverty that makes even homeless Americans look comfortable. This poverty fuels environmental destruction, war, hatred, and terrorism.

Outsourcing can solve this, and in fact, it has already made a great difference in the world. For decades, we outsourced a lot of manufacturing to Japan. Today, Japan is wealthy, a stalwart ally, and is so successful that it is now, itself, outsourcing to poorer countries. We have also outsourced to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea, turning them into prosperous, pro-American places. All this outsourcing caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the U.S., but today we are not worse off for it.

Today's outsourcing is having even more impressive results. China wants so much to sell to us, that it is abandoning communism and adopting capitalism. They may not be our friend yet, but they no longer want to be our enemy. India is turning away from its smothering socialism, and there is finally hope for a prosperous future there. When the Iron Curtain lifted from Eastern Europe, the people there knew that the path to peace and prosperity was trade and friendly relations with the West. African nations are no longer clamoring for handouts from our government - billions of dollars of which have been squandered in the past. Instead, they want only to be able to sell to us without tariffs and quotas.

Minimum wages and protecting the environment are luxuries that rich nations can enjoy. A starving man with starving children will work for any money he can get, burn down any forest he has to, and kill any endangered animal to feed his family. The key to solving these problems is to make third world countries wealthier, and the key to that is outsourcing. Opponents of outsourcing and globalization would sentence the majority of the world's population to more poverty, more starvation, more war, more environmental destruction, and more jealous hatred.

It's hard to console someone who has lost his job to outsourcing. But history shows time and again that new jobs are created in ways people never would've anticipated, that free trade helps people at all economic levels, that countries with mutually beneficial trade will not go to war against each other, and that the people of those countries will not hate each other. It would be tragic for us and the world if the U.S. government limited outsourcing.

Posted by: rea   Posted on: 06/14/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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