#foreign outsourcing

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Foreign outsourcing has gutted generations of working class Americans.

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Fun fact: The only people who support outsourcing American jobs out of the country are the ones whose jobs never got outsourced.

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An instantaneous solution to end foreign outsourcing.

1) Anything that arrives on the docks, citizens can take for free. Free Chinese HDTVs for everyone! China won't get a dime of profit, though. Too bad for them! 2) Any company that moves out of America, all their intellectual property rights are null and void. Hackers are free to rob them of anything they own in the electronic universe, courts will be directed to look the other way. Displaced workers can take over the closed offices and factories. 3) Infuse America with the spine to actually make this happen.

[lejacquelope]

A devastating, quick-kill solution to end all foreign outsourcing

If it comes from outside the country, and the trade deficit is over $10 billion, make it legal to take the product off the store shelves. Or, better yet, take it right off of the ships at the dock. Movies shot in foreign countries are free to copy without payment if they're made in a year where the deficit is over $10 billion. Software made by overseas labor is ALWAYS free to copy. In other words, the government simply steps aside and lets the people have at it when the trade deficit gets too high. Oh and of course the President should send the WTO a picture of his or her bare backside in response to the resulting trade disputes. It's mean, it's spiteful, but globalists will get the hint very quickly and change their tune practically overnight. Oh, but they might also cut off our oil? GREAT! We need the kick in the ass! We'll have to switch to solar roads and electric cars and cut down on the more costly ocean acidification, global warming and the associated crop-killing super-droughts. The rest of you can choke on your burning fossil fuels. And I'm quite serious about this. But as usual, it won't happen because America lacks the guts to play hardball.

[lejacquelope]

I have one more solution for foreign outsourcing...

If it comes from a foreign country, make it legal for Americans to just take it off the shelves for free, right up until the trade deficit hits zero. 

The World Trade Organization can go kiss America's asses while they bleed the globalization machine dry. Conservatives can go kiss America's ass while they cry "deh communism", too.

How many hours do you think foreign outsourcing will last then?

[lejacquelope]

Foreign outsourcing and Automation are destroying more jobs than they're creating.

To EVERY counter argument that comes up, point this out: Nearly 102 million working-age Americans are not working. That includes over 90 million working-age Americans who've given up looking for work (a trend that has been steadily rising for decades) and nearly 12 million more who are looking for jobs and not finding them. In addition there are 3 people fighting for every available job out there. Anyone who says automation and foreign outsourcing are creating as many jobs as they're destroying, has a serious mathematics problem. You cannot mathematically say that automation and foreign outsourcing are creating as many jobs as they're destroying, and hope to back that up with math. It is mathematically impossible. Hammer this point home brutally, with no mercy and no relent.

[lejacquelope]

You know what the most hilarious thing about the "What about the starving Chinese" argument is?

Automation.

When automation hits, all affected production will become local.

Automation is killing more Chinese jobs right now than it's killing American jobs. And that's before we reach the ability to 3D print cars on a consumer level; and computer parts, too. When this technology hits the consumer market, it will hit instantly and hit like a tsunami, and what will be the first casualty? Chinese factory jobs.

According to some panic-mongers, this means that China will starve and go to war with Asia. Uh oh.

[lejacquelope]

The future of work favors women over men? Uh, no it doesn't.

Feminist intellectuals have been talking endlessly about how women are succeeding in the workplace and men are graduating less from college and are unable to adapt, etc.

While on one hand they cry about sexist wage gaps that no longer exist, on the other hand they talk about jobless, shiftless, "pre-adult" slacker men. Underachieving and increasingly obsolete in the new economy, men now face a decline while women are on the rise. The feminist perspective all depends on whether they want to gloat and taunt men, or run and hide behind the cover of victimhood.

But here's the reality, as told by Mother Jones Magazine themselves: the future of work favors no one.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/12/disappearance-human-work

I think this is actually even worse than Autor suggests. Yes, women upskilled as they broke free of postwar gender constraints starting in the 60s, but that trend has pretty much run its course. Female labor force participation peaked around 2000, and since then it's been falling too.

What's the answer? Liberals suggest more vocational education. Conservatives think we should stigmatize nonwork and reduce welfare transfers. Everyone agrees that more kids should go to college.

But will any of that work? Craft work has long since given way to factory work, and if Chinese workers will do factory work for less than American workers, then more vocational education won't do much good. Likewise, if there just aren't enough jobs for the weakly educated, stigmatizing nonwork won't do any good either. It will just immiserate people for no reason. And the kind of people who are most affected by all this—high-school dropouts and those who barely got diplomas—aren't going to college no matter how much we push them. It's just not going to happen.

It's hard to be optimistic here. Until about 2000 or so, you could argue that declining male labor force participation was mostly due to increasing female participation. But that doesn't wash anymore. Since 2000, work attachment has been going down for everyone. There's something else going on, and I suspect it's very strongly related to increased automation. We've seen this especially strongly since the 2008 recession, as businesses let go of millions of workers and then discovered they just flatly didn't need them back when the economy started to recover.

Female labor force participation peaked around 2000, and since then it's been falling too.

PEAKED AROUND 2000, folks.

Behind all that ballyhooing about women graduating from college more than men, and women taking up responsible roles in society while men sit at home playing video games, there's the reality: women are being driven out of the labor force. Most likely by foreign outsourcing and automation.