Offshoring is a natural component of global free trade

Thursday, October 23, 2003 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: offshoring, global marketplace, free trade

https://www.naturalnews.com/008509.html

Tweet

---

Regardless of the economic consequences of offshoring, which is worthy of another discussion altogether, the idea that U.S. companies would be barred or perhaps even criminalized for hiring the services of overseas workers is so out of touch with the modern global economy that it can only be accurately called Dark Ages Economics.

To succeed in the global marketplace, a nation -- and its workers -- need to be uplifted, not blockaded behind artificial trade barriers. In other words, U.S. workers need to compete, and they need to offer skills and abilities that employers can't find in India, China, Russia or other offshore destinations.

From the get-go, U.S. citizens already have a major advantage: they speak English, and they speak it without the heavy Hindi accent. You may recall that Dell recently closed its Indian technical support office. It wasn't that the Indian workers weren't skilled enough, it was that U.S. customers couldn't understand what they were saying!

Any legislative move towards penalizing U.S. companies for hiring overseas workers would be the first step in a long, downward spiral in the global competitiveness of U.S. companies. It would hurt companies, hurt the national economy and ultimately hurt workers by encouraging them to be less than competitive.

Encouragingly, the Department of Commerce apparently agrees with this view. Anything other than full-out free trade is nothing less than the path to economic protectionism, which only leads to local impoverishment.

Recommended reading: Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, which overturns the myths of protectionism, spending your way to prosperity, and other common economic fallacies.