You know, if the US stopped outsourcing jobs to India and the Philippines today, and instead brought the Indians and Filippinos to the US to compete with US citizens for those same jobs, they would still take them, except where prejudice and favoritism limited their opportunities. In other words, given a level market, it isn’t the place that makes the difference – it’s the people. Put aside the lie that their superior productivity is due to working longer hours; anyone with an elementary school math education can measure productivity per hour; limit them to the same hours US citizens work (which, if we’re honest, often include overtime for hourly workers, and 60hr weeks for salaried supervisors), and they’d still be more productive. Put aside the non sequitur that they’re willing to work harder for less pay; so what? By that logic, if they’re capable of being more productive at lower wages, imagine what they’d be capable of at the same wages. Again, level the playing field and they’d still wipe the floor with US citizens on the whole. What’s amazing is that they do so well even with all the hurdles the US already throws at them.
The truth is that the same attitudes that clamor for penalties to bar or limit outsourcing are the ones that oppose simplified and expeditious immigration and favor protectionist tarrifs. Why? To protect a fatter, slower, lazier, more willfully ignorant culture against one that is willing to continually strive for self-improvement. The US version of “I work hard all day” is a 40hr work week in a frigidly-cooled office with high-fat lunches, constant snacking, and plenty of breaks, meetings, and a bigger ass size each year.
The housing market went bust partly because it was a deck of cards, and partly because those homes were never worth that in the first place. The job market got outsourced because salaries and wages are so inflated compared to the value and competence actually delivered by US workers on the whole, that that’s not sustainable either.
What’s funny is the people that bitch about outsourced call centers handling luxury items. You want it made overseas, where it’s cheaper, so you can buy it at Walmart for bottom dollar, while bitching about offshore jobs that make it cheaper than you can; you don’t want to pay more than $40/year for a service contract, but you expect the people who take your call to be the ones that work for $18/hour in the US and waddle around on smoke breaks several times a day. And it’s for something that, most of the time, you don’t even need. It’s your latest gadget or toy – a luxury item.
You’re the pampered kid in the film The Toy (Richard Prior, Jackie Gleason), whining that you can’t have it all given to you – you’re exactly the reason why outsourcing works and foreign workers do a better job than you can (or will). But you’re also the classic bigot, as you bitch about outsourcing. You want your servant to hop and fetch and eat your scraps and work for nothing, but you want to abuse him over skin color, accent, and the fact that he’s poorer than you. And then you complain that you don’t have enough, because he’s taking some. You don’t have enough work, you say, and you don’t have work just handed to you, because he’s willing to strive for it and take less than you do.
And then, too, you moan about not being able to understand an accent; that’s your deficiency – not theirs – they learned English from the Brits, just like the US did, and they often speak it more correctly. It’s wondrous to hear some hick asking, “dyew have that in cone flar blew, ah need a lahter culler” and then complaining about someone’s accent, or an ebonics-talking wannabee pimp who can’t conjugate the verb “to be” talking, in broken English, about people who ‘don’t speak English’. Yep, it’s a stereotype, just like the first time you imitated an Indian accent, or laughed when it was done. Stereotypes work, because there’s some truth in them. One truth is that people speak in different accents and, by definition, they’re not universal. Another truth is that being a US citizen doesn’t mean you speak English correctly, even by ‘merican standards. When you hire a US president that can’t pronounce the countries he wants to go to war with, you’ve pretty much given up any reasonable claim to a command of the language, let alone much else.
So that’s it. Outsourcing isn’t taking “American” jobs, lazyness is, arrogance is, empty pride is, and at some point it just makes more sense to hire the better guy and listen to you bitch. The mortgage people haven’t caught onto this yet. They would rather foreclose homes and lose more money, than refinance at lower interest rates and turn a profit – because the pride is more important – the ideology that they are right is more dear. That’s OK, because now all it takes to turn a profit is someone willing to go back to financial self-interest, Adam Smith style, and he’ll kick their fat, arrogant asses. What’s funny is the number of foreclosed homes being bought up by small, capitalist, foreign investors, while communist hicks sit on their butts and twang in dummy-school English about “them forners and Chah-nees” who ‘don’t belong here’. The irony. “If the founding fathers knew…” – yeah, the ‘founding fathers’ would have approved – they’d have thought you were criminally lazy.
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