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Originally Posted by Ducimus
What i think was stupid was outsourcing american jobs, so fat cat CEO's could keep their 6-7 digit incomes and golden parachutes. That greedy group of people f*cked this country over and just about every body in it.
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Do you really imagine that's why jobs get outsourced? Big wigs in the company boardroom were sitting around and thought "
Hey, let's send these jobs overseas and keep the savings for ourselves"? That's what a lot of labor unions and failing industries who want you to pay them subsidies or pay a higher price for their goods want you to think, but it's incorrect.
The first thing this protectionist myth omits is the fact that many jobs in American industry weren't outsourced, but replaced by machines. Some people think that's a travesty, too. Thank God nobody listens to them or we'd still be wearing hand-woven woolens.
The second thing the myth ignores is that outsourcing (or rather, offshoring) is often an economic necessity for businesses. If even one company does it, everyone ends up having to do it it to keep up. A company may decide not to outsource, but in the end it will find that outsourcing half the jobs is better than losing all of them because it's bankrupt.
Thirdly, while people love moaning and groaning about outsourced jobs, nobody ever stops to notice that we somehow miraculously have more jobs, more money, more goods and services, and a better quality of life than we did before the jobs were outsourced. That's because they also think that the money disappears into some fat cat's wallet. In actuality, it usually gets used to finance other operations or invested in another business venture. Ironically, the very same industries you'd like to protect are all dying because people wanted to protect them. They became uncompetitive, and now they're disappearing.
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I i could seperate the car from the message being conveyed at the beginning of that commercial and replace it with BUY AMERICAN, i would. Cause the first part of that commercial was perfect to convey that message. But there was another part to that message, and it also part of the problem, aside from executive greed. We as a people were industrious (as in not lazy), always did our best, and took pride in our work. I cannot in good concious say we are the same way now. These are values that need to be rekindled.
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I'd put in another addition to that commercial that says PAY FOR AMERICAN, but then I don't suppose many people would want the product.:DL
With the exception of government dependents and lawsuit addicts, Americans are still industrious, do their best, and take pride in their work (mostly), they just do different kinds of work now. All that building, stamping, forging, crafting, and sweating was not an end in and of itself. People work to make their lives better, and over time, entire societies better. The two main reasons we don't build as we used to are 1) Nobody wants to pay for it, so we mostly build only very expensive things with very expensive machines, for very wealthy people, and 2) why should we build it when we can pay someone else to do it for cheaper? It's not as if this weakens us as a nation. We still have the lion's share of the world's most advanced industries, and we're still wealthy (though good ol' BO is trying to remedy that) because we have a more advanced economy. Investment, finance, and service have taken the place of long days at the mill or the factory. So what?
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China now owns a good F'ing portion of it, and they keep trying to buy more of our country.
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And? It's not like they're going to convert the country into China or something. And we own quite a bit of the rest of the world as well. If you're worried about insidious interests trying to buy up America, I'll direct your attention to Capitol Hill, where special interests at home and abroad have had the nation bought and paid for for over a century now. You're helping them make their arguments right now, as a matter of fact, you just don't know it because "Buy American" is a lot easier to learn than global economics, politics, and history.
America is in a better position than you realize, as we have monopsony power over a lot of markets, and we own most of those markets to boot. Our money works for us, now. If we phased out all trade barriers and took a much more business-friendly approach to taxes and law, we'd pretty much run the whole damn planet more than we already do in fairly short order. But instead, we're too busy looking back and dragging our protectionist feet to move forward. It'll be that that kills us, if anything.
ps- I apologize for the very direct tone, it's not aimed at you personally. This subject just happens to be a major bugbear of mine.
