Reply #38: Oh Boy!!!! YOu aint gonna believe this: [View All]

[Jacobin]

Exporting Lou Dobbs Print Mail



By James K. Glassman
Posted: Tuesday, February 10, 2004

ARTICLES
Scripps Howard News Service
Publication Date: February 9, 2004

What's gotten into Lou Dobbs? Once a sensible, if self-important and sycophantic, CNN anchor, he has suddenly become a table-thumping protectionist.

Dobbs has been running a series--praised by the AFL-CIO's Rich Trumka as a "nightly crusade"--called "Exporting America." Slanted and inflammatory, it decries "outsourcing" or "offshoring"--that is, U.S. businesses using suppliers in other countries, like workers in Ghana processing New York parking tickets or programmers in India writing IBM software.

Another word for outsourcing is "trade," an endeavor, as economists learned early on, that benefits both parties to the exchange.

Nothing has changed since Adam Smith wrote in 1776: "It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family never to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy."

Still, writes Julian Sanchez of Reason magazine, "Free traders are trapped in a public policy version of 'Groundhog Day,' forced to refute the same fallacious arguments over and over again, decade after decade."

While trade can cause pain to some workers, lack of trade causes far more. Imagine if software firms did not search the world for the best labor at the best price. Consumers would pay more, and shareholders would have less to reinvest, which would mean fewer jobs for Americans.

http://www.aei.org/news/filter.,newsID.19890/news_detail.asp

NO WONDER THE FUR WAS FLYING