Just watched Lou Dobbs nail business representatives about outsourcing (e.g. the National Chamber of Commerce, iirc).
Outsourcing from the corporations' point of view is about using foreign standards of living to undercut our own cost of labor. Given that inequity, we cannot reasonably have a philosophical position that denies Indians the right to do IT work. But neither can we allow outsourcing to fourish unrestricted when we locally have no cultural safety net with which to nationally survive it's direct effects. Such a net would have to involve retraining as well as the health care, food and board insurance to allow survival during the time of retraining.
I say business must be made to help build these safety net improvements to our infrastructure as price for a free trade policy on outsourcing.
Outsourcing will normalize standards of living eventually. That is, assuming a progressive view in which democratic freedoms becomes ubiquitous and secure worldwide.
The corporate approach will drag our standard of living down in all modern nations. The progressive approach therefore has to be a more fervent attempt to bring the standards of living up in other regions.
In IT I know for certain there is enough work for us all to do, there are hundreds of years worth of work just to exploit the capabilities of computers today, let alone to take advantage of the rapid advancements. The corporate approach makes this "us v. them", ours must be "us and them".
I'd love to know a way to raise their standard of living without relative job loss here, but I can only think of two things:
(1) export the jobs
and
(2) ensure people are paid minimum wages abroad
and
(3) provide a local safety net that executes the "on to better things" strategy.
That means exported jobs and we're stuck with the "americans are clever" angle where we are expected to innovate some new work for ourselves. I do think this can be done with proper investment, American people are up to that although our corporations are not.
Dobbs points out that the American worker is very productive per hour and so we are talking about cost reductions, not an unproductive worker.
While the corporations cannot resist the simple immutable attraction of a better margin on the worker, just as clearly the Nation cannot let that productivity and skill just go to waste.
PS: What is a liberal or progressive perspective on the idea of a world with no borders either militarilly or economically (of course natural borders would still exist) and just one currency. How long would it take for such a system to reach equity?