However workers are treated or considered, they’re still capitalists if they’re trading their services (work) for pay on the market.

I don’t know about 1 particular good produced in Asia, and using that anecdote to condemn offshoring completely without having some details of fact in the case is just irrational.

What I do know in 5 minutes of Googling is that Converse was bankrupt, had lowered its quality, Nike bought them, lowered the quality on shoes even more to save money, shipping out production to various Asian countries, and also did rebranding to tie in Kurt Cobain and other cultural paragons to the brand.

Since Converse was bankrupt, it was obvious anyone buying it would do a combination of lowering costs, increase volumes & distribution, improving demand and possibly raising prices to get to a break-even point, no?

I still don’t see that Converse prices went up significantly, but maybe you have that data? (someone in 2003 at the time of buy-out wrote of the price for Converse AllStars as $35 – are they significantly more now?)

And frankly, I didn’t buy Converse in the early 1990′s because I was already getting ridiculously cheap $5-10 Chinese shoes dumped on the market. Suppose if had more money, would have gone for something more impressive, but since I spraypainted the sneakers anyway, brand didn’t matter much.

Anyway, the bigger points should be 1) China outsourcing (and others) saves us money – if enough, that difference can improve our lifestyle and go into enhancing other services and product lines. 2) The US did not have a population base or production capability large enough to handle worldwide demand anyway. China proved convenient to ramp up production to new levels for new markets, with most of the profits going to us (Barbie, Coke, etc.) This was seen in the booming of the US economy in the late 90′s. 3) The sellout of the US economy and the unwillingness of leaders to fix problems has caused us to stall out. This includes the housing bubble that despite being obvious took 10 years to crash with no action by Bush. It includes the giveaways to the defense/military and oil industries, as well as subsidies to agriculture. It includes letting medical costs run rampant and not fixing a basic problem for worker mobility.

Just because we don’t clean up our own house doesn’t mean China or Japan or India is to blame. Yes, there are currency trade problems with China, and unequal trade terms, but most of the issues and costs are from our own corruption. In the end, as the #1 economy, we should be helping to drive prosperity in the 3rd world, not shoving our money under our mattress and telling them all to stuff it. And that means doing a good job growing, improving environmental performance, and finding high-value ways to add to development so other countries can fill in the lower value or complementary parts of products. (manpower, basic ingredients, location-based services, et al)

Geez, you’ve got it slanted weird. Workers can also enjoy the surplus value between their actual effort and the market value of what they do. Workers often have lower risk than owners. If a worker fails, she’s out her job. If an owner fails, he’s out his investment plus his job. If the workers can get a union in, work conditions and compensation are typically much better; if not, the situation can deteriorate to sweatshop. There are good places to work and bad. Their are employers who seem to attract good workers and keep them satisfied, and that agreement even shows up in the quality of the product.

Likely the jazz background, I presume. Even though it sounds familiar, there’s often something unexpected. On good nights at least.

Oh nice, a snobby worker. Believe it or not, workers are capitalists too, or didn’t you know?

Immigrants have always been let in to do the grunt work. Have a better idea? The immigrants I know are the ones who work hard so their kids have better jobs, not stuck running a corner grocer 18 hours a day like them.

I can get a pair of Converse sneakers for $27, which in 1972 was $5. Are you telling me Converse sold for less than $5 in 1972?

If you want to talk cars, here’s a site that tells you that cars are safer than they used to and on average last much longer than the 100,000 miles of the 1950′s: http://www.freeby50.com/2008/11/history-of-new-car-costs-and-average.html

A bunch of nostalgia. Sure, working with your hands is fine, whether cleaning out toilets or doing an assembly line. But a GM assembly line of 2011 isn’t a GM assembly line of 1959 or GM would have much worse problems. Downsizing, increased efficiency, et al. are just parts of recurring new efficiencies.

Sure we can pay American workers 10 times the wage what any warm body in the world could do – and then we can cry about poverty in the 3rd world. Or we can take advantage of American infrastructure and logistics and access to capital and education and clustering effects around technology centers to give a little more and earn a little more. And then I don’t mind increasing immigration to let newcomers do the work the older citizens have outgrown.

In terms of more jobs for job churn, while everyone was talking about infrastructure “shovel ready” jobs for the 2009 stimulus, service-friendly internet jobs and research jobs and education jobs could get out the door much quicker, especially if taking advantage of cyberspace for telecommuting and remote service delivery.

While we have to have some manufacturing base, this isn’t 1933. While I was all for doing more for the Big 3, in the age of Google and eBay and Apple and Amazon, we should have a few more tricks up our sleeves than “roadside beautification”. There are areas in green energy research, new energy grids, pluggables, nanotechnology, etc. that could make a bigger difference for our overall efficiency and competitiveness. But all we got except the Chevy Volt already in design was a lot of wishful backward thinking.

[Disclaimer: I once was enthusiastic about new efficiencies of computation in the financial sector. Obviously we needed to bolster the computing capabilities of the law enforcement agencies before that Pandora’s Box got opened. But oddly I do agree with Gates that our enforcement of internet security is a serious national security threat, much bigger than anything from roadside IEDs by Al Qaeda, and tied in with China’s push for backdoor illegal economic hegemony.

Of course I’m a free market advocate when there are reasonable bilateral conditions.

We gain through lower cost for goods ($1 off purchase price is typically $1.10 with saved taxes plus add your saved time and SS/Medicare deductions to earn that $1). Some of these goods also become subcomponents for more complex systems. In general, the US has done very well in sales & marketing based on offshored production.

But if we don’t tax any of these companies on profits, then we’re missing key revenues both to keep government services going as well as care for workers who need retraining/up-skilling or other kinds of unemployment/underemployment support.

Of course we could go back to the days when working on a US assembly line or in a backroom soldering shop was considered a career. But with the world’s most prosperous economy, it’s hard to see why we should be trying to compete with the majority of the grunt work, vs. making the supposed promise of a service economy actually work.

(part of that making it work means making sure the financial service economy doesn’t rip off the rest, and part means not throwing away money on fictitious job growth plans from Big Ag and others. And hey, part of it could be in making health care competitive. I don’t see why to sit around complaining that China’s doing our hard labor for us when we can’t seem to fix our internal corruption that’s much more debilitating)

And what?

The US market relies on job churn. In a healthy economy, people are both downsized and quit on their own, and both end up working for new companies at comparable salaries.

Lessee, Romney was doing leveraged buyouts during the Clinton years when the economy was booming and unemployment was at an all time low – when even new hires were getting salary bonuses depending on the market.

So read a bit about job churn: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/22/AR2007012201089.html

The problem is not about firing people and making companies more efficient. It’s about a number of issues like a healthy market where investment in internal resources is encouraged, where companies aren’t given tax breaks to be anti-worker, it’s about having universal health care so workers can easily move to new jobs without threat of personal catastrophe, it’s about the steady degradation of the US economy through devaluing the dollar and subsidizing the best-connected companies through infusions of dollars or 0 taxation.

The only reason the dot com recession lasted so long is that Bush refused to do any stimulus in 2001. Otherwise companies would have quickly regrouped. And in 2008/2009, well, we made up a theory that if you give companies huge tax breaks they’ll run out and hire. Nope.

Somehow I think Romney had his audience measured up, as they all seemed to laught sincerely at his joke. If it had been Bush, he would have taken himself seriously, that he’s unemployed.

Romney’s not responsible for job losses under Bush, nor lack of jobs under Obama, wherever his past wealth was made.