Then you can tell me what will happen to a company that decides “short term profits” can be dispensed with. That decided it’s not going to go overseas when five of its competitors are. There are probably a lot of companies that said “thanks, but no thanks.” Their windows are boarded up, and their employees are in no better shape than any of the others.

One of the most pervasive delusions of the Left is that people who run businesses are just plain bastards, and they could all make hundred-mile-per-gallon cars and pay someone thirty dollars an hour to paint McDonald’s toys or screw a circuit board in if they really wanted to.

Who uses the catch phrase “shipping our jobs overseas?” And why? What are their solutions?

Has anyone thought through the process of manufacturing cheap consumer items here? How it would be set up? How it would work? I have. Years ago. So have many others. Try it. Go through the concept and basic numbers of opening a factory in Nebraska that makes an electric fan you can buy for fifteen dollars.

America’s Golden Age of Labor was back when the Third World was slogging behind cows for a living, and the rest of the First World had been blasted to shit by a world war. How long did we think we could pay a man huge wages and endless benefits for turning a bolt on an assembly line when there were billions of people out there who could do the same job for much less?

Think about your hypothetical fan factory. Try the tariff trick, and watch what happens to the trade balance when Europe decides to buy Chinese fans instead. Try all the tricks.

Businesses didn’t “happily” ship jobs overseas. The ones that refused to do so simply folded up while other businesses did it and survived, or often, businesses that were actually founded overseas started building the products instead.

Go to the BLS site here. Click on the boxes about manufacturing employment (some go all the way back to 1939, others only back to 2006 for some reason.) What do you see? Check the graph option. How does the manufacturing graph compare to overall non-farm employment since 1940?

Here’s a paper I found a while back on the subject which also has a lot of the employment graphs and numbers at the end.

The Chinese know this, they have all that kung fu Art of War stuff–divide and conquer and all that, to rely on. And once they got over all that Chairman Mao nonsense, they have 5000 years of strategic thought and commercial savvy to draw on.

The key to understanding this suicidal national behavior on our part is that even though our trade relationships with China have been disastrous for the country as a whole, some Americans have gotten very rich by dealing with them.

Those Americans are not likely to favor any fundamental change in relations between the two countries, in fact, they will use every bit of political influence they can buy to make sure things stay the same.

And as for people making money, I’m all for it. I’d love to BE one of those people. What I resent are those who’ve sold out their own country to make a buck.

I’d sure like to see American companies say “thanks but no thanks,” but I don’t know if that’s in our genes.

I don’t WANT to believe in American decline, but evidence for such seems to mount almost daily.