Obama doesn’t know what it means:
Because the Obama campaign knows that one of its most important constituencies is economically illiterate yokels — a demographic to which the president himself apparently belongs — it is on the airwaves claiming “Romney’s never stood up to China — all he’s ever done is send them our jobs.’’ (Whose?) The Obama campaign cites a Washington Post story on the subject, and the Romney campaign has noted that the folks over at WaPo did not distinguish between outsourcing and offshoring (and, indeed, the story is not a very smart one — do read it and see). Obama responded thus: “Yesterday, his advisers tried to clear this up by telling us that there was a difference between ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring.’ Seriously. You can’t make that up.” And indeed you wouldn’t have to make it up, because it is a real thing: different words with different meanings. (Seriously, can we get this guy a library card?)
To be fair, he’s ignorant about business and economics in general. And it shows in his policies.
He never learned any of this in the fantasy he created of himself as a one-time businessman for the purpose of loathing.
He is definitely a moron. I doubt he knows the difference between gross and net, either. Romney is going to eat him alive on this latest idiocy.
You’re making an elitist argument. If you want to talk to the masses, you have to talk like they talk in movies and on TV shows:
Outsourced (2006) – IMDb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425326/
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsourced_(TV_series)
🙂
Those Indians took our jaaawbs. Those jobs should have stayed in Amurica.
Not singling you out Bob-1 but people on the left tend to be really ethnocentric when it comes to India and other countries that have economic relationships with the USA. There is pervasive xenophobia about having economic relationships with certain countries. If I was a liberal, this is where I would play the race card.
Oh, I love global trade – it allows me to visualize world peace.
Obama often gets criticized for being too professorial (not on this blog, but elsewhere), and he is probably knows all too well that he can mock Romney for making a correct but out-of-touch distinction.
(Regardless of my feelings about the entire Lewinsky/Jones/Starr affair, I was quite impressed when Clinton pointed out that the definition of “is” is ambiguous, but that didn’t impress most of the electorate!)
“I was quite impressed when Clinton pointed out that the definition of “is” is ambiguous.”
Really? I mean… Really?
“Outsourced”? It grossed $161,000. I don’t think the movie exactly resonated.
And Bob, at all the factories I’ve worked at, everyone knew the vast difference between “outsourced” and “offshored.” The most common thing factories were newly outsourcing while I was working on them was cafeteria services. Vending and snacks for the breakrooms have almost always been outsourced, and coffee is a toss up. At one Michelin factory the blue collar workers were complaining that the plant had outsourced coffee services under a contract that forbade departments from having their own coffee pots, and since everyone hated the coffee the vendor was providing, everyone was bringing a thermos to work, sometimes two.
That the Obama and the left don’t realize that the working-class vernacular draws a distinction between outsourcing and offshoring shows just how utterly out of touch they are. I doubt there’s anyone in the Obama administration who has ever stepped foot in a factory except to give a speech.
But it’s probably shown on college campuses all across the country. Where did Bob-1 see it?
Netflix. Cute movie, not political, and certainly not xenophobic nor against global trade.
I was curious whether anyone ever commented on the use of the word “outsourced” vs “offshored” in a movie review (not that movie reviewers are the best people to ask, but you never know until you look) and I found this:
“Director John Jeffcoat knows his corporate world: how the word “offshore” is used as a verb, and what’s meant by “improving the minutes-per-incident.” But the incidents per minute here seem so fresh that they might have come from a sensitive and observant person’s travel diary. Only a director who met India halfway could have made this movie.”
http://www.outsourcedthemovie.com/reviews.html
“Outsourced”? It grossed $161,000. I don’t think the movie exactly resonated.
I liked it. Especially the ending.
Yeah, cute movie.
When it’s Obumble we’re discussing, his ignorance seemingly covers most everything except Socialist Governmental Theory, and golf. So being ignorant of business and economics is no stretch of the imagination.
In general.
Maybe he has gotten better with all the practice but it has been reported in the past that Obama sucks at golf and it takes him longer than average to play 9 holes.
10 minutes/hole is for the little people. And though I suck at golf I can manage 100 strokes in less than 180 minutes. And it’s fair to say that when Obambo’s future minions pissed and moaned about W golfing, W stopped. But then again, responding to vox faux populi is for the little people, nicht wahr?
I’m praying he’ll give a speech comparing outsourcing to the benefits of vertical integration, like they have in Chicago and New York where office space is in tall buildings instead of the strip-mall layouts common to surburbia.
Let’s not get too crazy on this…
Offshoring is a type of outsourcing. Offshoring simply means having the outsourced business functions done in another country.
If you ask Thomas Sowell, he will explain why outsourcing is a very good thing. It allows a company to be more productive in a different category.
In other words, it doesn’t take away American jobs as the demagogues claim. It increases American jobs by making American more productive.
It is an easy issue to demagogue because the unseen part of the equation is easy to ignore.
“outsourcing” is a way of explaining comparative advantage to business majors who skipped their economics classes.
Couldn’t a job be “offshored” while still being done within the company? If, say, Apple owned the Chinese factories where iPhones are made, the jobs would be offshored but still insourced.
Remove the word “could” and you just defined offshoring.
Of course, McGehee. That doesn’t change the fact the outsourcing can include or not include offshoring.
Which means they are in fact two different and unrelated concepts. As Romney said.
Who was it you quoted above that said “Offshoring is a type of outsourcing”?
Yea, I believe Thomas Sowell is taking after Milton Friedman with regards to protectionism. Milton said that when jobs are sent overseas then yes domestic jobs with regards to exports will decrease. But new jobs will be created in other areas that influenced by the increased imports. So, in theory it ends up being a wash.
It’s just too bad I didn’t patent my idea of outsourcing the entire business except for my paycheck. And I mean, the ENTIRE business.
I’m having trouble with my patent on 4-D printing technology, which is the same as 3-D printing with the addition of a fourth dimension, time. With my 4-D system parts can be printed in the past, so an engineer can have a part printed two weeks before he even realizes he needs it, entirely eliminating the design cycle by doing all the engineering and layout in an alternate timeline.
However, I’m wondering if someone in the future used my invention to print out my 4-D printer prototype and submit it years before my model 1 reached the patent office, in which case prior art is going to leave my claim stuck in a bureaucratic temporal causality loop.
Normally this wouldn’t make any sense, but one of the first things my Model 1 printed out was a Model 5E. I must have invented the 4D-5E in the far future and sent it to my Model 1, and a sticker on the 5E says it can print parts prior to its own existence using TimeBoost+. I assume that once the 5E hit the market my patent claim was screwed.
Similarly, the person who patented total job outsourcing in out there somewhere, and though you may not suspect it, you are probably doing their work for them right now. In fact, perhaps I didn’t get my 4-D printer patent because I am actually their outsourced employee and they retain the intellectual property rights to my work.
The scary part is that all of this makes more sense than anything Obama has said about business.
Great idea. I’ve worked for many people in the past that skipped the design cycle.
First, the Washington Post article criticizes Bain for outsourcing jobs to companies that moved the jobs offshore, so there’s really no distinction between those two with regards to Bain.
Second, a lot of Americans have seen outsourcing. What usually happens from their prospective is that their job gets done by somebody else making less money. After all, the work still has to get done, and the outsourcing company needs to make a profit while reducing overall costs. This is typically accomplished by reducing wages and/or benefits.
These strategies may be good for business profits. They’re not good for American workers, and if Romney’s going to run on creating jobs, then it’s fair to ask how many jobs he’s created and in what countries.
They’re not good for American workers, and if Romney’s going to run on creating jobs, then it’s fair to ask how many jobs he’s created and in what countries.
If you’re going to speak of “fair”, then you need to consider the question fairly. If your job can be done by someone else much more cheaply, then you need to be doing something else. There’s an inefficiency that is costing other jobs. It’s not fair to Romney or Bain to only note the jobs that are lost, not the ones that are created.
“. If your job can be done by someone else much more cheaply, then you need to be doing something else. ”
The saving comes from denying benefits, especially health benefits.
benefits are just a less efficient part of pay.
Not disputing that it is pay. I am disputing the idea that “you need to be doing something else” just because your job can be done more cheaply but less humanely. Similarly, workplace safety might be a good place to cut costs (who cares if the workers get cancer in 20 years, eh?) and if you want to look at workplace safety as part of pay, that’s fine, but again, the lack of safeguards doesn’t mean that “you need to be doing something else.”
wtf does “less humanely” mean? If you don’t want the job, don’t work there. It’s not just for Americans, it’s for everyone. The last time an employer offered me health insurance I said “I’ll have the cash value, thanks” and guess what, they gave it to me! I used to wish I could do the same for all the workplace health and safety bullshit.. now I work from home, and get many perks besides. It’s really simple: if people didn’t want to work there, they wouldn’t. Stupid laws which enforce minimum wages, conditions and benefits are just removing choice and killing jobs.
Trent,
You know why libertarianism doesn’t catch on? Because you have to ask what “less humanely” means. People can get exploited. We can’t always stop it, but the world is better when we can stop it some of the time.
Say I run a factory without proper safeguards, such that workers will be exposed to suspected carcinogens, because it is cheaper that way. If I level with them about the risks, I’ll have to pay them a lot more (if they’ll work there at all), so I don’t tell them. (I’m sure I’ll find a way to rationalize my decision.) Lets look at what happens to the workers in three alternative worlds:
Laissez faire capitalism: they work for me, they get sick later.
The world voters want: The government steps in and says “Bob, just get your factory up to the minimum health and safety standards, or we’re shutting you down”.
Libertarian fantasy: The workers pay an independent inspection company to check my plant for hazards. I let the inspection company onto my premises because no one will work at a company that doesn’t cooperate with the inspectors. The inspectors explain the risks to the workers, and the workers make their decision.
Did I describe the libertarian fantasy correctly? If so, do I have to explain why it is very likely to remain only a fantasy for the foreseeable future?
“Exploitation” is a real word with a real meaning, it involves the use of force. If no-one is forcing you to work then you are not being exploited. In the real world people know the risks they are taking. They may shrug off those risks, as plenty of people still do today, but that is their choice.
Homer Hickam’s father died of the black lung. You don’t see him up there saying coal mining companies are evil or exploitative. In fact, you won’t hear him say a bad thing about his childhood growing up in a company mining town.
We don’t need government, nor inspectors, to know what risks we’re taking.. we got along just fine without them.
Take your liberal fantasy that the government is “here to help” somewhere else, I’m not buying.
Bob-1: “Laissez faire capitalism: they work for me, they get sick later. ”
And then they (or their families) sue your ass off, wiping out every penny you ever made. Of course, you realize that is the certain outcome, so you make sure that these expensive-to-train employees aren’t exposed to unnecessary risk, and that therefore your business isn’t exposed to unnecessary risk.
This is so obvious it shouldn’t have to be spelled out for you.
“And then they (or their families) sue your ass off, wiping out every penny you ever made.”
Ok, first, if, like me, you’re a factory owner who wants to exploit people, you don’t hire people who are likely to sue you. I hire people who didn’t graduate from high school, and whose families are back home in Haiti (or whereever). Second, under laissez faire capitalism, no one is inspecting my plant, no one knows what unsafe practices I’m employing. The workers see everything of course, but they don’t understand what they see – not only haven’t they heard of material safety data sheets (or whatever), they can’t even read them. They aren’t stupid – it isn’t like they are going to mistake my factory for a health spa – but they have no idea that I’m doing something that is going to kill them. I tell myself I wouldn’t have even gotten into business at all if I had needed all the extra funding needed to to set up a safe factory, and then where would my workers be? Really I’m doing them a favor.
Is this just storytelling? History is full of exploited workers who didn’t sue the people who preyed on them. Government regulations improved the situation.
Trent says “. If no-one is forcing you to work then you are not being exploited. In the real world people know the risks they are taking.”
I disagree. Plenty of people have no understanding of the risks they are taking, even when the people who are endangering them do know the risks. We can’t all study enough biology and chemistry and physics to protect ourselves. (Of course, this is true for experts too, but lets just consider cases where expert knowledge would help.) One benefit of government mandated “workplace health and safety bullshit” is that ignorant people are protected from those who want to endanger them.
I ended with “those who want to endanger them”, but I should have said “those who are willing to endanger them.” I have a lot of sympathy for factory owners, and I know there are plenty who care about their workers and don’t *want* to endanger them. I know a guy who owns a small screen printing operation – he has, roughly, 30 employees. He’s not a close friend, but we’re friendly. When I’m there, I’m almost overcome by the smells. I presume that what he is doing is legal. I hope it is ethical. It makes me a bit queasy – maybe he should have better ventilation. Maybe I ought to bring it up with him, even if it hurts our friendship. In any case I think he’s a hard working guy trying to do right for himself, his family, and his workers, and their families. The right government regulation and enforcement would improve (or has already improved) his workplace.
(I know I shifted from health benefits to workplace safety, even though only the former has to do with outsourcing, but I hope we all agree that workplace safety shares some of the same issues regarding “the nanny state”.)
Yeah, I’m not down with being down on the “health and safety bullshit.” If we accept the common-law notion that the proper role of government is to protect people from duress (theft and fraud — involuntary exchanges), a job is not much different. We expect products to be safe; we expect workplaces to be safe. No reasonable person would go to work expecting to be dismembered or poisoned.
Of course, in the real world, regulation doesn’t work exactly as it should in theory, but neither does the justice system. I don’t see any reason to ditch either one completely on that basis.
The saving comes from denying benefits, especially health benefits.
That is one of the big advantages of being a contractor.
At one time, health benefits were a neat compensation gimmick due to tax code. They cost about a third less for the same compensate value as wages provided. But now, health costs have gone up, due in large part to the prevalence of generous health benefits. So those health benefits no longer provide enough value to justify their cost.
I can’t figure out what the WaPo is criticizing, since they say that Bain invested in a company that gave management advice to companies that were outsourcing, which isn’t outsourcing. If Bain was outsourcing its jobs, then wouldn’t Bain’s jobs be performed by other companies? Wouldn’t it be these other companies that were deciding where to perform the work? If you outsource your cafeteria services to Miguels Foods, and Miguel hires a bunch of illegal immigrants to slap food on trays, how do you get blamed for both the outsourcing and the hiring of illegals, none of whom you hired?
The WaPo says that a year or two before Romney left, Bain invested in a couple companies that were helping companies like Microsoft outsource some tech support, offshoring some to Europe, Japan, and Australia. How much was domestic outsourcing and how much was offshoring? The article doesn’t say.
Does it help the US to have a 2 AM tech support call answered by a bleary-eyed third-shift worker in Atlanta versus an alert first-shift worker in Sydney, London, or Tokyo? The article doesn’t ask. Do Australian, European, and Japanese workers get paid that much less than rural Americans who tend to work call-center operations? The article doesn’t ask that, either.
How much of this has anything to do with Bain, much less Romney? The article really doesn’t clarify anything on the matter. It reads more like a business article written by a reporter assigned to either the sports or the fashion beat, which means even the WaPos business reporters couldn’t make any coherent or sensible charge.
Chris, often jobs are outsourced because it makes no sense to do them internally. A small manufacturing company running a cafeteria is horribly inefficient. Even it pays the cafeteria workers next to nothing, it is still employing a couple of managers that have nothing to do with its core mission or purpose. The little side operation will be buying food-service items and ingredients retail, in small quantities. Its manager will go to meetings where at best a bunch of other managers who know nothing about food service will criticize the green beans. Every time there’s a round of corporate belt tightening, the cafeteria workers will be at the bottom of the food chain, since they’re not making parts.
If instead the company contracts out the cafeteria operations, the management of the cafeteria will be spread across many dozens of corporate sites, will buy their food and equipment in bulk, have their delivery trucks running routes instead of sitting idle all day, with one truck for each site, etc. It’s more efficient, with less waste, and with greater expertise at delivering the needed service.
Similarly, companies don’t need to be running their own waste-disposal operations, lawn care, or powerplants (Lexmark, for example, runs its own legacy steam plant, with boiler engineers and the whole nine yards). Following in this vein, why would a software or hardware company be running a call center? Answering phones all day is entirely different from writing code or running robotic assembly lines, as different as trimming the hedges, running the cafeteria, or mopping the floors.
I outsourced building cleaning to a pro cleaning company. Whose job did I take away? Some hypothetical part-time cleaning crew I never hired? Why is it better for them to be on my payroll instead of someone else’s? This is madness, even for the Usual Suspects…
Very true. It is madness, and my response was a pile of mush because I still can’t make heads or tales of the accusation. Was Romney supposed to invest in companies that were being eaten alive by companies that were investing in companies that were providing management advice to companies that were offshoring, or invest in companies that were outsourcing to management companies that were advising clients not to outsource so much, though their clients were still offshoring? Should he have invested in a company that gave advice to an Indian call center about shifting jobs to China, and would this be considered offshoring by India even though India and China aren’t offshore of each other?
The attack can’t go beyond a soundbite without the attacker sounding like a blithering idiot. Even the Washington Post couldn’t turn it into a semi-coherent narrative. If they could, I could figure out what they said and retort. But I can’t, because what they said doesn’t make a lick of sense. I can’t even follow it, and I can explain the collapse of the housing market via rating the risk of tranches of subprime variable rate mortgages by the of insurance market against the bond market of those tranches.
And then Obama doubled-down on stupid, claiming it’s crazy to think offshoring and outsourcing are different concepts, I assume under the same theory that input and income are the same thing.
The whole story only confirms extreme media bias, because if the sides were reversed the WaPo would not only have dug into Obama’s background, but we would now be discussing the appropriate level of outrage that Obama’s preacher’s third-cousin twice-removed once claimed, according to unnamed sources, that Alabama watermelons taste like shit. We would be long past Obama’s close friendship with terrorists, his tutalege by Communist Party USA members, his financial ties with convicted con men with close ties to Saddam Hussein, and whether Saddam paid for Obama’s house in Chicago. What the press refused to do to Obama, even though it was trivially easy, they’re desperately trying to do to Romney, and abjectly failing at it.
Indeed, and what about fabless companies? Are they evil? If I get together a half dozen EEs and design ICs for other companies (being someone else’s “outsource”) that otherwise would not exist, how is that “not good for American workers”? It guess every post-Deming advacement is double-plus-ungood to the Leftists who want all jobs under one roof, underwritten by the State and owned by one worker locked in stasis (along with the rest of the economy) for 30 years. They don’t seem to have abandoned that Marxist vision, have they?
Don’t get stuck on stupid – the article isn’t talking about outsourcing peripheral functions like cafeterias and janitors. They’re talking about outsourcing basic functions like customer support.
Who cares if they outsource CS? That means other companies arebstarted to fill that demand and I’ve got news for you, there are many call centers right here in the USA. But why would it be bad to have call centers overseas that not only service Americans but foreign companies as well? How ethnocentric.
Know what else companies outsource? Accounting. Seems to have worked out well for the accounting industry and their customers.
You know what else outsources well? HR. Yes, another one of those “basic functions” that firms are morally bound by the decree of Commissar Gerrib to keep under one’s roof because shut up.
They’re not good for American workers
This is exactly where you are wrong Chris. It’s great for American workers. Thomas Sowell could explain it to you better than I can. You should read his books. But I’ll give it a shot.
You’re only looking at a worker losing his job to another worker and you’re not even looking at that correctly. A worker loses their job, which means they are free to enhance their value to get a better job. That better job is available because the overall economy is better for the change. This is the reason American workers get paid better in the first place. Businesses that are more efficient can afford the capital expense that makes it possible to hire the better trained employee.
Without this, American workers would be paid third world wages. That’s what you’re arguing for.
So a 50-something employee is free to “enhance his value,” thus allowing him to start over in a new career at the bottom, assuming he can get hired in the first place. Yeah, I would be careful who I said that to – some of those old geezers still pack a punch.
There is actually an alternative to both offshoring and Third World wages – intelligent trade policy that puts tariffs on imports.
Sorry, trade wars don’t work. Been there, done that. If Toyota and Honda stop offshoring their work to folks here in the south bay, how is that good for American workers?
The reason they set up factories here is that Reagan threatened tariffs on imported cars.
No, it was the quotas, and Reagan’s trade war was disasterous, particularly to American semiconductor firms.
While your hypothetical 50-something may now be able to keep his $60,000 a year job instead of settling for a $50,000 a year job. You’ve made the costs of good of services more expensive with your “intelligent” tarriffs which effectively reduced your 50-somethings buying power to $40,000. He’d been better off if you just left well enough alone.
Look at Shanghai where they have no tariffs on imports. They have one of the freest and fastest growing economies of the world. People are lined up by the droves trying to enter Shanghai and get their shot at prosperity. Just on the other side of the fence in China you have a strict command and control economy where the quality of life and standard of living of the average worker is dramatically lower.
I helped a 50 something person get into a new job in a new industry, actually 2 of them at the beginning of this year. And no kidding, the jobs are ones that my company outsources to a sub-contractor that hired both of those people. Their pay and capability went up. I realize that’s anecdotal, but then it’s not mere conjecture such as Gerrib puts out.
Earlier you were talking about CS, this is already an entry level job. Someone 50 years old working CS would change from one entry level job to another and if they have CS experience would have an easier time getting a job in that same industry.
Chris, I’m so glad you cherry picked the 50 y.o. to make your point. It’s an admission that a younger person could upgrade themselves. It’s also an admission that an older person should have worked out their retirement.
Being 53 and poor I believe I can respond directly.
Ask any financial consultant and they will explain how 20 years of stability will provide you with a comfortable retirement. So your 50 y.o. had about 30 years to do so.
But suppose they did not. You chose an interesting phrase, “to start over in a new career at the bottom.”
Why would you assume that? Except for my last job I never had one last more than a year or two. They kept going out of business until finally I chose one that owned all the beryllium mines in the free world which then made the top ten list for layoffs in AZ a year later. Yet, I’ve never had to start over at the bottom. Each job enhanced by skills and knowledge.
Should I be blaming you Chris for my work history? I once had a boss call my sister to find out why I didn’t argue with him about letting me go. That was my last job which lasted most of a decade. Why didn’t I argue. Because I’m a capitalist. I believe in an owners right to make decisions, right or wrong. They hired three people to replace me, not because of my work but because the boss didn’t like me working remotely (which I did even when in the same state in my office next to the servers.) I wanted to live with my wife two states away (foolish me.) My code was bulletproof (my diabetic fingers would be a lot of trouble doing that today) and I had documented productivity equal to any three other programmers. After years with the company, there wasn’t any code they had that I hadn’t worked on.
During those stable years of employment I got married. We didn’t do well together. None of my encouragement helped. She now makes about what I used to and works for the state of CA. Combine our income and we could have financed a good retirement in a single decade.
It didn’t happen. Should I blame you for that as well?
It’s not the employers responsibility to give you a good job. It’s not the grocers job to give you good food. Who’s responsibility is it?
It’s the 50 y.o. and he can’t pass that to anyone else including politicians.
I’m 53 and poor, but I’m not done yet.
Never mind that. 65% of people polled by USA Today think that Obama could handle an alien invasion better than Romney.
A third of Earthlings believe in UFOs, would befriend aliens
Of course they think that. I think that too.
Nobody can figure out who Obama is, where he came from, what he believes, or why his mom did bondage porn in a card-carrying communist’s house (yes, I’ve seen the magazine pics) because Obama is obviously part of the alien’s first wave vanguard of sleeper agents. He would know more about their command structure than Romney, and negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict without any human bloodshed, because human bloodshed would be wasted nutrients.
Obama is a pre-exoskeleton skidder!?
Or is he one of the tall lanky dudes in charge? I’m betting skidder, he’s just not the leader type.
Mr. Turner – If your hypothetical call centre was in Tokyo you might not notice; many Japanese have very good English without much of an accent – from the point of view of an American, anyway. Sydney or London, you might notice the accent but you wouldn’t have any problems. But that isn’t what happens, is it? Nearly all the outsourcing/offshoring (which depends on the company) is done in India – and the call centres used by many companies employ Indians (natch!) who have trouble understanding English and whose accent is so thick as to be almost impenetrable.
Which doesn’t matter to those companies who don’t care about customer service – and there are a lot of those.
I also have my intelligence insulted on a regular basis by people I didn’t want to talk to in the first place. Cold-called by someone in Bombay with a thick Indian accent, selling something I don’t want – and the first thing they say is something like “Hello, my name is Mark and…”
I gave in to the impulse once. My answer was something like “Sure. And if that’s so my name is Chang. Pray tell, how do you expect me to buy something from somone who has lied to me in the first sentence?”
Competition is the easy solution. If two companies are the same except one offers better customer service… guess who wins.
Ultimately it’s the customer that decides. Years ago the elites decided wonderbread was a bad value for customers and tried to get rid of it. The customers had other ideas. We still have wonderbread. I haven’t eaten it in years because I prefer other breads, but does that mean I should force other people not to have that choice?
This is one of the flaws of libertarianism – it doesn’t take the real world into account. Here in the real world, there is something called “barriers to entry” which means that only so many companies are able to get into the market. These barriers include things like capital, critical mass (there’s a reason Microsoft Office is a corporate standard) and economies of scale. In short, one may not have a competitive choice.
That’s exactly why barriers to entry must be lowered at every turn. Usually this means less government. Sometimes it means access to capital, but usually not; because competition almost always starts with less money. The new competition usually wins because they focus on better service and better understanding of their customers.
Microsoft won because it’s competition were idiots and were unprepared for what Gates did. An OS is a monopoly. Applications are going to be create first for the OS that has the majority of users except in very niche cases.
Back in the day there were many potential competitors to the microsoft OS. All they had to do is realize they were selling razor blades and give away the razor. Instead they tried to win in court. Big mistake.
QNX was a major heartbreaking story. Back in the early 80s they could have blown away Microsoft. Instead they made their operating system so expensive only the auto industry and few others could afford it. It was light years ahead of Microsoft. Now it’s a historical footnote.
A liberal bashing libertarians for not being based in reality, I just spewed sprite all over my tablet.
Personally, I like talking with “Peggy” in Siberia . . .
I just knew you were kinky. You’re not the same Paul that went on that trip in the RV with those two English dudes on a Comicon adventure, are ya?
Ah, but the WaPo article didn’t tie Romney to any offshoring to India or China, just Japan, Australia, and Europe. He left Bain in 1999, before going to India was the rage.
Unfortunately, businesses can’t be run at a loss so they actually have to make hard choices about how many people they can employ and what they can be paid. A bankrupt business doesn’t employ anyone. A break even business is one bad cycle away from bankruptcy. The purpose of a business isn’t to create jobs but to survive and surviving is tough these days.
Bain is in the business of helping companies survive. If the choice is to outsource some functions to other companies or go out of business what should a company do? Out of pride should they keep everything in-house until the company goes under or should they take the steps needed to survive? Some jobs are better than no jobs after all.
I will offer an interesting challenge. GE has been a profitable company of long standing. Jack Welch (Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1960) became CEO in 1982. What did he do? He began firing lots of engineers. He made lots of demands on those that were left. He was described as America’s toughest boss. These actions boosted profits for a time. Good? Well, maybe not so good. College students as far back as the 1980s noted what was going on at GE and, to be fair, other places that employed STEM workers. What was their bottom line? Getting paid decently with the opportunity to have decent lives, not spending all their time at work under control of abusive bosses. Young people started avoiding STEM fields.
All the inspiration and education in the world won’t fix problems like this. Reform of management is needed so that these jobs are once again attractive to lots of people.
BTW, the Jack Welch model of leadership is only productive for relatively short periods of time. People get tired and make mistakes. The people who decided to launch Challenger that last time were so sleep deprived they really didn’t know what they were doing. New York State now has laws on the books restricting hours doctors can work. Yes, this a governmental restriction of one profession’s freedom. Why does New York State have this restriction? Because a sleep deprived doctor killed the teenage daughter of the New York Times medical correspondent on the operating table.
Why, yes, I do have some libertarian sympathies. I also think we need better management in too many places in the public and private sectors. Management needs to be aware of more than what little they have been taught in business (or is that “busy ness”?) schools.
That’s enough for now.
It cracks me up how internal business decisions are now under the rubric of “libertarianism” — as if a particular internal structure were “libertarian” and others were not, some empirical (yet magical) threshold being crossed along the way. Up until last week that was a political position with respect to a certain size and scope of government.
Must be some epistemological flu going around…
Internal “busy ness” decisions? Hmm. I’m talking about narrow minded, ignorant fools making messes. Some people turn to government for help. This is very easy to understand when some crackpot — excuse me, dedicated professional — does things that harm to others out of his (or her) own ignorance. If the workplace isn’t open and democratic, it is hostile to real liberty. For instance, Jack Welch’s assault on ordinary GE workers.
Damn, you’e right. Ownership might run an enterprise into the ground, or sell it, or just disband it altogether. Shit, if we don’t get the Bolsheviks in there to seize the factories today, imagine what might happen. Democracy now!
On the ‘quality’ front, either product or customer service.
Here in NC they used to make jeans. Wrangler and Levis used to both be made here,. from cotton thread, to denim material, to finished jeans. But slowly the company that owns those brands, Blue Bell, moved the manufacturing ‘offshore’ to Central America.
Now the products suck and you can complain to the company until you are as blue as your busted jeans. I called them per the tag on my last pair of Wranglers, but it’s a no win situation. They’ll replace them, but they just get you another pair of crappy jeans. I’ve talked to plenty of people who have complained, but Blue Bell doesn’t seem to care.
If they are wearing their own products they’ve got to know their product sucks. But I guess they’d rather make an extra $2 per pair, than bring the work and quality, back to NC.
I recently saw a news article about a company that makes old fashioned style, heavy denim jeans, here in NC or SC (can’t find the article now), but they are $100 per pair. And they admitted they are ‘over charging’ because they can. They are THE only company in the world making jeans the way they were made 50 years ago and beyond. They can’t keep up with the orders.
So somewhere, there is room to make jeans, in the U.S., at something more than $40 for offshore Wranglers and Levis and onshore jeans
for $100 by (? still can’t find the article). Maybe there’s a company idea AND name right there.
“…’Onshore Jeans’, just like dad and grandpa had when they were riding that hog or pounding those nails…”
BTB, this is off-shoring:
When it’s Obama’s own campaign money, he sends it to create jobs overseas.
With the credit card checks turned off on his campaign site, the money may well never make it ‘onshore’ in the fire place.
Loved Williamson;s line “. . . e Obama campaign knows that one of its most important constituencies is economically illiterate yokels. . . ” Indeed. And many of them show up commenting here!
Chris (“Aristotle” Gerrib writes: “This is one of the flaws of libertarianism – it doesn’t take the real world into account.” In the real world there are all sorts of kooks, power-junkies and coercion-addicts the who want to use the power of the State to l;egally do what they’re too cowardly to do illegally: i.e., force other people to libe, spend their money and run their businesses the way they–the kooks, power-junkies and coercion-addicts–want them to. Libertarianism was born to combat such scum.
Probably libertarianism was born when the caveman with the biggest club–let’s call him Bar-Ak– decided to redistribute the wealth (probably animal skins and rocks) of his fellow cave-dwellers. Maybe some of his victims decided, “Hey, wait a minute–those are MY skins and rocks.” And probably in that primeval down of freedom-loving, there was some Neanderthal–let’s call him “Og Gerrib”–who told them, “No, no–you must subit to Bar-Ak! He knows best! He’s only taking your skins and rocks for our own good!” Thus was born the “club-humper,” ancestor of today’s State-shtupper.
Please excuse the typos above. I was typing at top speed on a borrowed computer. Now that I’m back, it has given me time to realize that when Hive party-liners say things like “libertarianism doesn’t deal with the real world,” what they seem to be saying is, “In the real world, I want to force you to do stuff, and you’re not letting me! Waaaahhh!”
No worries. The interesting thing is Gerrib says something stupid about the flaw of libertarianism, then goes into “barriers to entry”. Yet he is the one who supported bail out of the “too big to fail” corporations from banks to automobile manufacturers. He’s the one supporting raising taxes on everyone, including small business (remember his complaints about Joe and his plumbing business) to pay for the debt accumulated to save the larger and failing companies. But supposedly, it’s others, not him, that support these barriers.
Per usual, the contradictions are stunning.
What’s really amazing Leland is that you can point out these inconsistencies, yet they have absolutely no effect on Gerrib’s thoughts? I’ve said foolish things from time to time (ok. Shut up!) But I think one of my favorite qualities is that I’m teachable.
How is it Chris does not seem to be? Could it be like those protesting Karl Rove that have no idea who he is? Is it just laziness (which doesn’t seem like the case because at least Chris does make an argument?) Is he just unwilling to examine his own beliefs? I don’t know. It baffles me.
I hear you about writing foolish things. I’ve done it and been called on it. Watch out for Titus and Mr. Turner; they call a fair game.
As for Gerrib, he’s just a boring political hack. You can predict his views on anything by simply considering how it benefits the Chicago Democrat machine. It won’t be long until Chicago follows Stockton, but it will probably happen after Romney becomes President. Then we will hear how Republicans destroyed Chicago’s economic future.
My brother-in-law lives in Lockeford (near Stockton.) I just sent my ex in Sacramento a link to an article about Stockton. Maggie had it right about other peoples money.
The optimist in me (which general gets beat up by the pessimist in me) hopes that even boring political hacks can be enlightened. I just always want to think good about people.
In the old days the king would get his troops to loot and rape his enemies but that’s just not civilized. The civilized thing is to loot and rape your own citizens and invite others to join in (and vote illegally of course.)
Actually, Ken, what you describe is sort of how the State originated, contrary to Gerrib’s probable “social contract” delusions but according to the work of Franz Oppenheimer, who was a big influence on Albert Jay Nock. The Oppenheimer thesis is that way back when, you had nomadic barbarian raiders who would swoop into a territory, loot it empty, burn everything to ashes, and kill everyone. Then the nomads settled down, realizing that instead of laying waste to a region, they could let their captives live, continue producing wealth, and then steal as much as they could without killing the golden goose. In return, they would offer the conquered protection of rival barbarians. Thus the State was born.
We agree. The question is, how much of our soul are we willing to sell?