Where the jobs are

Afriend recently got stuck when he tried to explain to his son, who was struggling to find a job, how our economy got to be the way it is. He asked my help since I am a well-known crank on the matter. I offered him this:

Last summer I was in a Home Depot standing in front of a veritable mountain of new air conditioners. They were all from China, which was no surprise. But to be annoying I asked a passing clerk where they were made. He was a young man, hired more for the spring in his step than his knowledge of international sourcing. We both looked at the boxes, piled in a pyramid, eight levels high. The boxes didn’t say anything about China. But they did say “Made in PRC.”

“Are these from China?” I asked.

He paused a moment. “No, they’re from Puerto Rico.”

Over the last 20 years, countries around the world have ditched their communist governments, or at least turned their backs on strict communist economic principles. At the same time, India and other Asian nations have rapidly moved into global trade. This has meant billions more workers around the world competing with American workers to make stuff and offer services.

And during this entire period, what did the U.S. government do to meet this challenge? Nothing.

Two observations are often made to justify this disruptive period. The first is that the situation is an inevitable outgrowth of globalization and natural economic laws. In this scenario, nothing that the foreign manufacturers have done to U.S. workers differs from what American manufacturing did to the older economies in Europe.

A second explanation holds that what we are seeing is the necessary cost of the death of communism. Under this logic, communism was held in place by violence and oppression, and sooner or later it would have to be maintained by wars. Countries that depend on each other economically are less likely to go to war, not wanting to fight with their customers or suppliers. Thus the resulting pain of unemployment is preferable to wholesale conflict.

But are those two observations valid? To assess them, we have to understand our history. War, it is said, is God’s way of teaching Americans geography. Perhaps unemployment is how we learn economics. Are Americans, whose jobs have been shipped overseas, the walking wounded in the war against Marxist totalitarianism? That’s a stretch, but perhaps it will make lawmakers feel better when they vote to cut off unemployment benefits. If you’re keeping score, they can shout that capitalism has defeated communism. We won. Oh, by the way, don’t bother to show up for work Monday.

My friend invited me over to talk to his son, suggesting I could explain the new economic realities more clearly than he could.

No, thanks, I said. He’s your kid. You do it.

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Jeff Danziger is a political cartoonist and author of Rising Like the Tucson, a novel about the Vietnam War.

Editorial, Pages 10 on 01/06/2014

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