General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Free traders, and I mean all of them, worldwide, do you understand what's wrong here? [View all]ComplimentarySwine
(515 posts)By and large, compared to a lot of places, even a good part of our "poor" people have way more than the poor in other countries. Compared to these other countries, our middle class is living like kings and queens. Now, for whatever reason, a lot of Americans think that they deserve to make these high wages because that's what allows us to have a two story brick house and two new SUVs in the driveway and that fancy flat-screen TV, while people in some of these less developed countries are literally starving to death or being killed by disease.
By shipping some of our jobs over there, we're elevating the standard of living of those workers far beyond the standard of living that they would otherwise have. Compared to us, it seems to me that they live like slaves; sleeping in dorms on the company grounds with other workers, not having comprehensive safety practices in place, disregarding the environment, etc. However, it seems that there is little argument that they believe that they are far better off than they would be if that manufacturing plant were closed down.
The real problem seems to be the seeming unfairness of the fact that while our middle class sinks lower, and the poor in other countries rises up towards the middle class, our rich are getting obscenely wealthy and flaunting it in more ridiculous ways.
Simply getting rid of outsourcings makes me feel as if we might share the blame for those overseas workers who find themselves starving to death after we bring their jobs back to the US, so I have a hard time directly supporting it. How can we go about raising the standard of living for our fellow human beings in these other countries while at the same time narrowing the wealth gap here in our own? I really don't have an answer for that, but I'm pretty sure that bringing all of those jobs back is not the answer.