Nobidy took your jobs- your US corporate bosses gave your jobs away for a mess of potage. Now the potage has been consumed and you only have the mess left.

Ain't that the truth?

Or at least part of it. One way of looking at it is "they took our jobs" but I prefer to think of it as "they took our capital" - capital that might have been invested at home, but instead is invested abroad. Two sides of the same coin really, but sometime you have to flip things over for a different perspective.

Today, "globalization" is trumpeted as a means of more evenly distributing wealth, since people in target nations are employed where they otherwise wouldn't be. A form of labor arbitrage really. Good for them, not so good for us.

But why is this even necessary? Why send capital overseas when you can bring the labor over here? This already happens at the margin (Mexican farm workers for instance) but why not make it a formal policy? After all, the "New World" was founded on immigration, no? That didn't work out too badly, so why stop now?

It's not like there's any lack of labor wanting to go west. If the freedom to cross borders applied equally to labor as it does to capital, then it wouldn't be long before Ricardo's comparative advantage was back in force as the main driver of international trade. As it stands now, absolute advantage is the order of the day, but that's only possible because labor can't move freely. If it could, you'd have the same wages on a world-wide basis and neo-marxists would have to find some new bug-bear to whine about.

Of course all this means facing up to some hard realities that have been swept under the western capitalist rug - like the fact that resources are getting scarce, or that world population is growing at an ever increasing rate. Still, I notice it's mostly poor countries where that seems to be a problem. Urban industrial societies produce fewer children - in many cases below the replacement rate. Maybe if we all had urban industrial societies we might all be better off? In the long run, that is. In the short run "they took our jobs" plays to the kind of xenophobic knee-jerk that politicians are all too fond of exploiting, so I expect to hear more of it as this depression drags on.

ebear