Thursday, March 04, 2004

This Modern World: "Now of course, the free traders in the audience are already composing lengthy emails about the inevitability of change and the invisible hand of the free market and so on--but here's the problem: the invisible hand only functions efficiently when labor and capital are equally mobile. Unfortunately, here in the real world, pretty much any job can be outsourced, but human beings are still stuck living where they live, in Buffalo, New York, or Little Rock, Arkansas, or wherever they may be. They're not going to move to Bangalore to keep their jobs. And since the cost of living is considerably higher, even in Little Rock, Arkansas, than it is in Bangalore, they simply can't compete, and the invisible hand is transformed into an invisible fist which pummels one side at the behest of the other--not exactly what Adam Smith had in mind. And decades and decades of progress for working people in this country are simply wiped out, as we devolve further and further into a winner-take-all, screw-the-rest society. "

This is the argument we ALL need to be making right now!

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