Re: attacking FSF [Re: Paid trolls

[Russ Allbery]

Snuffelluffogus <darkred@myway.com> writes:

>> In the meantime, we can't figure out how to efficiently route excess
>> economic resources to people who could actually use them.

> When jobs are sent overseas, it only increases this excess labor you
> speak of, making the rich richer,

When jobs are sent overseas, a wide variety of very complicated economic
interactions happen, pouring more money into the economy of the other
country, taking money out of the US economy, building the middle class in
the other country as well as the rich in the other country, possibly
creating more demand and more markets in that country for US companies to
sell into, and having a wide variety of varying effects on both the US and
the foreign economies.

It's way more complex than you're implying, and even professional
economists wouldn't tell you that they fully understand or can predict all
of the fallout.  That's why it's controversial.

If it were as clear-cut and obvious as you state, there wouldn't be as
many intelligently argued disagreements over it as there are.

> and further eroding the standing of the middle class.

The US middle class are the obscenely rich in the third world.  It's worth
keeping that in mind and occasionally taking a more global view of this.
>From the perspective of the average inhabitant of Bangladesh, enriching
the US middle class is indistinguishable from enriching the elite rich.

That's not to say that offshoring does anything for the average inhabitant
of Bangladesh either.

> The USA middle class has experienced something like 35 straight months
> of job losses. Offshoring is just another attack on the middle class by
> the rich who, as you say, do not need more money.

I find it highly amusing that there are so many people getting all upset
about outsourcing now because (*gasp*) middle class jobs are actually
moving overseas who, when industrial jobs were offshored, didn't give a
damn and loved the lower prices.

There's a lot of hypocrisy going on here and very little real critical
analysis.

Offshoring is hardly even the primary source of economic stratification.
Why are nearly all of the janitorial workers here in the Bay Area
Hispanic?

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>