<--- N. Gregory Mankiw, the head of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. said that "outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," which makes it "a good thing."  He is wrong.  He has the wrong foresight.

This site has looked to the future and understands that outsourcing is NOT good.  The future has to be carefully planned.  Today all jobs requiring an education can be outsourced. In the distant future, robots will enable the replacement of ALL jobs.  Currently, educated foreign workers willing to work for peanuts can replace most all American workers for jobs requiring an education.

Perfect productivity means that everything can be produced with no effort and no labor.  The goal of engineers and programmers has always been to automate everything. 

Economists have always sought to increase productivity and competition.  However, this may be the wrong goal for the future.  Perhaps we need to actually make jobs less automated so that more jobs will be created.

However, there is optimism as well.  Look to the theater for an example.  Movies have made it possible for one actor to be seem by millions.  However, movies employ relatively few actors.  Most actors today do live performances.  People pay to see live actors.  Theater isn’t as efficient as the movies, but it produces most of the acting jobs.  Other jobs also don’t have to be optimally efficient.  Look at the teaching and legal professions.  They are high paying, but are they efficient?

The truth is that every job requiring an education can now be replaced by jobs requiring a computer and a few technicians.  Inquisitive computers can be programmed to ask skilled technicians for information.  Once given the information, the computers can run courts, make medical diagnoses, teach classes, run governments.

Let’s look at what jobs can be outsourced or automated from the face of the earth.  Teaching jobs can be outsourced.  Foreign people can put lectures on CD’s and students in the USA can play them to other students.  Computers and people that feed facts into an inquisitive computer can replace the legal profession.  Foreign doctors that advise nurses and technicians in the USA can replace the jobs of doctors right now.

Is outsourcing good or bad?  Outsourcing is good if it keeps the economic engine tuned and running efficiently.  A balance between the supply of workers and the demand for workers is what keeps the economic engine balanced, tuned and running optimally.  If one part of the economic machinery gets out of balanced, the whole economic engine of a country will become destabilized and run inefficiently.

Outsourcing is not a simplistic thing.  Jobs that are outsourced must be controlled.  We must look to the future and decide what jobs are necessary and desirable and try to protect those jobs.  Absolute productivity and competition are not necessary and perhaps not desirable.

This site endorses Kerry for president for these reasons and others. Note, however, that the future requires progressive thinking that goes even beyond the practical and viable short term solutions that Kerry has proposed. However, short term solutions may yeild the best way to achieve future goals. Go Kerry!