The article I am responding to can be seen here:
Outsourcing More Than Jobs Groucho Marx once said, “From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it.” The same thing happened to me with Jon Reed’s column, “Outsourcing more than jobs”, except that I actually read it.
Like a good Chuck Palahniuk book, I will start with the ending. Reed caps his rant on outsourcing by calling those who pick and choose “which ideals to export” hypocrites. This is funny considering that he begins the same article by stating what ideals “we Americans” export. Not among those listed is the free market system which promotes the use of this evil outsourcing. Does this make him a hypocrite since he actually selected ideals that we export without asking us? Or am I, like Reed, just asking a question and assuming you agree with me since I use the plural nominative similar to a French monarch who continually and stereotypically cries out, “We We!” Also, if you are wondering, Reed successfully utilized the plural nominative fifteen times in his, singular possessive, opinion.
Reed poses many questions, six to be exact, and idealistic points that left me as confused as Andre Smith when learning he actually needed to prepare for the NFL combine. He speaks of America bringing “other countries to ‘share’ our beliefs.” If forcing by military action or persuading through economic sanctions means the same as sharing, then I would have to agree.
The article also criticizes Americans who want to spread liberties, but at the same time support corporations who exploit workers overseas. First, not all Americans really promote spreading democratic ideals passively or aggressively. Second, the underpaid labor which Reed speaks of, without citing statistics, does not directly affect Americans. He later proposes a question asking what benefits we citizens obtain by improving labor conditions worldwide. Since Reed failed to answer, I will. Besides higher prices, we get nothing. This is why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even acknowledged ignoring rights violations in China to stay focused on economic issues. Especially in times such as these, I suspect most Americans simply would rather have more money in their pockets than the knowledge that foreigners make above the previous minimum wage.
Reed then starts a pessimistic, mostly incorrect tirade. He points to the future “fruit-less job searching” for students. This does even not coincide with outsourcing, since our potential jobs will not involve menial labor. The ability for a country to send labor elsewhere pushes citizens into higher levels of work. It sucks that some lose jobs to other countries, but they are taken by a foreigner who Reed seemingly cares about anyway.
Another proposed question deals with where a company would rather build a factory if worker pay and treatment were forced to be the same. Reed, I assume, wants us to select Tuscaloosa over Malaysia, but he does not say unsurprisingly. There are so many factors involved in the decision that his question can’t even be answered anyway. What kind of company is it? What country is the company headquarters located in? Why are you even asking this question since you don’t even connect it to your opinion?
If the United States did go protectionist, others would just follow. Europe’s response to the later weakened portion of the stimulus bill that reeked of protectionism was not a nice and happy one. Companies like Mercedes Benz and Hyundai would not place factories in the United States, a type of outsourcing, if other countries followed this train of thought. I will not even go into the foreign relations problems we would encounter.
To answer the second to last question in the editorial, protectionism is not defending America from terrorism. That is national defense and just a game of semantics. Outsourcing actually defends America quite nicely be creating jobs, investment, and lifting those in poverty to not even consider terrorism and breed hate towards America.
Reed then finishes by spouting how our country was “founded on stopping tyranny” and how we need to stop the tyranny of corporations. What tyranny? If Reed means the tyranny of businesses in other countries, then it is the problem of those countries, but he does not even cite examples.
I, like most, would love everyone to have decent wages, low prices on goods, and democracies everywhere. That being said, the possibility of these desires happening is slim, especially in this horrid economic situation. Protectionism will not bring the world out of this crisis. It is certainly easy to bash outsourcing, but the unseen benefits it provides outweighs any of the harsh rhetoric it receives.
