(08/25/04)
There was a lot of talk about outsourcing earlier in the year, and during the height of primary season several Democrats made lots of noise about shipping "American jobs overseas." Some of the candidates even bashed free trade in general. Later, at the Democratic Party's convention, Kerry's acceptance speech included a phrase indicating that it was a bad idea to spend money in Iraq when there were underfunded problems at home.
Early in his presidency, Bush enacted steel tariffs designed to protect an American industry that had no way of competing fairly on the global market. George Bush's administration has really dragged its feet on the Sudan crisis. And I thought that Bush LIKED waging war on Arabs. Another issue coming up is foreigners coming into the United States without proper visas and being detained, interrogated (without counsel or consular presence), and eventually deported. The foreigners in question? Journalists from such extremist states as Great Britain and Australia (ironically two of our strongest supporters in the War on Terrorism).
What disturbs me is how well these messages resound with the public. People really get worked up about one white collar American losing his job to some Indians in Bangalore. Americans really believe that money spent at home is better than aid given abroad. Americans prefer 10 innocent foreign civilians dying in an unnecessary bombing to 1 American soldier killed in combat.
Well I think the average American is stupid about this. Because of the exchange rates and cost of living in third world countries, it often makes more sense to spend $10 feeding 10 poor third world children for a day than spending $10 to feed a single American child for one day. Outsourcing is causing a lot of prosperity in countries that desperately needs it. Each 12-year-old Thai girl making Nikes for $5 a day is one less 12-year-old Thai prostitute having unprotected sex with strangers for $5 a day. I say you put all the little girls in factories for 12 hours a day. It's better than the alternative. And Iraq may be a mess, but the problem is not that the United States is spending too much, it's that it was spending too little in both military expenditures (remember the kevlar plate issue a few months ago?) and reconstruction efforts (and what little IS spent on reconstruction is inefficiently used. Case in point: Halliburton price gouging). And now it may be too late to ever fix it with all the international support (military and economic) in the world.
I would love to see the day when the politicians stop pandering to the masses of morons with the outsourcing boogeyman and Kerry's military record and drowning hamsters and the Iraqi soccer team and comparisons to Hitler. Talk about economic policy and foreign policy and domestic policy. Whatever happened to education as an issue? Instead, the "issues" are just stupid. Bush should be getting killed in the polls by his track record alone (and he would be, too, if the Democrats had selected someone less detestable, like say, any other serious candidate in the running earlier this year).
I hate xenophobes.
