Why are Americans so afraid of some jobs being outsourced? I’m paying more tax dollars for “homeland security” to protect my family from the hopeless and unemployed of the Middle East. Why would I be unhappy that some of the world’s jobs are flowing to poorer countries?
Two Presidential elections ago, I was supposed to be afraid of a “giant sucking sound” that would take all the jobs to Mexico. It turned out that Mexico wasn’t much of a job threat. Instead, we now talk of sealing the Mexican border because too many Mexicans are still too willing to illegally cross the border-to take jobs American’s don’t want, like slaughtering cattle and making motel beds.
Congress recently demanded that Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan tell them how many jobs outsourcing was costing America. He said he doesn’t know. He said the only thing he knew was that trying to prevent outsourcing would lower American standards of living. That’s because everybody benefits in the long run from lower costs.
So long as we have enough good-paying jobs in America, we should be pleased that affluence is spreading around the globe. Personally, I think that’s better than shooting Mexicans on the north bank of the Rio Grande, or hauling away the smoking ashes of the Trade Center towers.
Not enough U.S. jobs? Our unemployment rate is down nearly to 5 percent again, which economists used to call full employment. Western Europe spent most of last year with an unemployment rate nearly double that, at 9 percent.
Our disposable per capita incomes have nearly tripled since 1980! The mild dot-com recession is already over, with economic growth now nearly triple the long-term average at 6 percent. By the time we vote in November, job creation numbers are likely to favor President Bush.
If we want a still higher rate of job creation, we’d have to make some pro-business policy changes, such as cutting business taxes and easing regulatory bottlenecks. For all his jobs rhetoric, such moves would go directly against Mr. Kerry’s political history.
What about a government “jobs” policy? Europe has had such policies, but Europe has created hardly any non-government jobs in the last 30 years. Meanwhile, America’s private sector created 40 million of them. Many are in new industries demanding skills upgrades, but the reward is higher pay. That’s been true since John Kerry’s New England outsourced its textile mills to the South-and replaced them with insurance companies and higher-tech manufacturing.
Complainers demand to know where the new jobs will be created-but nobody can know that. The genius of a free-market economy is that it’s willing to welcome new companies, new technologies, and new skills. If we’d stifled computers in the old main-frame days to “protect jobs,” we wouldn’t have the Internet, e-mail, eBay auctions, or all the other jobs and industries personal computers are creating today.
Some of America’s new jobs are in luxury services. Lots of them are in medical services and technologies, surely one of the booming markets for the future as the world’s still-growing population ages and use more of its greater wealth on good health. By the time George Bush or John Kerry knows where the new jobs are, they’ll be old jobs.
Freely competitive interstate trade is the golden goose that made the American economy great. Since 1948, the international trade liberalization of the World Trade Organization and its predecessors has led the biggest surge of human well-being and international job creation ever seen.
Let’s not kill the golden goose now, even if outsourcing includes some white collar jobs. We told the shoemakers that free trade was good, and they should get new training. Now, tell the white collar workers that knowing how to answer the phone is no longer enough. Upgrading skills is a never-ending struggle, but the rewards keep increasing.
Eventually, thanks to high tech, all the peoples of the whole world will live better than Americans today. And America should still be leading that parade. Is that bad?
