Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her Read Free Page A

different—Detroit’s prosperity plummeted because auto executives made bad decisions and overpaid their workers. Consequently others figured out how to make cars better and more cheaply not only in Korea and Japan, but also in other states like North Carolina. There is unintentional comedy today in watching Michael Moore’s film Roger and Me , in which Moore chases around the head of General Motors to find out why he closed the Flint, Michigan, plant in which Moore’s father used to work. Moore thinks that the plant was closed because greedy bosses like Roger Smith wanted to keep more profits. He fails to mention that unions, like the one his dad belonged to, pressured GM to raise wages so high that GM cars just cost too much. Hardly anyone wanted to buy mediocre cars that were so expensive. Either GM had to keep losing market share, or figure out how to make cars more cheaply. So if Moore wanted to find the greedy fellows who caused the Flint plant to close, he should have started by interviewing his dad.
    The bottom line is that in a globalized economy, the job goes to the people who can do it best and at the most affordable price. This is an iron law of capitalism, and it has been true in America for a long time. Globalization only changes the narrative in that the rest of the world also competes to provide the cheapest and best goodsand services. This is bad news for unions that want to bid up wages beyond what the market will bear, and bad news for American workers if they cannot compete in terms of price and quality.
    One option, of course, is to protect unions and American workers by restricting or blocking globalization. Remarkably some progressives who style themselves as compassionate and defenders of the little guy support such measures. And so do some conservatives on patriotic grounds. The patriotic impulse to protect America’s workers and American manufacturing is understandable. Yet to block globalization is to block the greatest engine of global uplift that has ever been devised. It is to inhibit poor people from developing self-reliance and entering the middle class, not through handouts, but through selling things that others want to buy. So anti-globalization efforts are really measures to protect people who make $20 an hour at the expense of people who make a few dollars a day. Whatever we call this, we can’t say it’s helping the little guy.
    I don’t think that anti-globalization is a form of patriotism, because while it helps some Americans it hurts many others. Consider the guy who used to make shoes in Cincinnati and got paid $20 an hour. Now that guy is in trouble, because Walmart contracts to make shoes in the Philippines or Thailand, and pays those workers $5 a day. Consequently shoes that would otherwise cost $85 are now sold at Walmart for $20. Who benefits from that? American consumers! So while globalization penalizes inefficient American workers, it benefits cost-conscious American consumers. Globalization hurts the overpaid worker and benefits the silent majority of American consumers.
    While it is easy to blame foreign workers for “taking” American jobs, let’s remember that the greatest thief of American jobs is not foreigners—it’s technology. Consider those travel agents who usedto make a good living booking airline flights. Now they are mostly obsolete. It’s cheaper and easier to book your own flights online. So should we “protect” travel agents by outlawing internet flight bookings? The very idea is absurd—no one has even proposed this. Similarly, there are now robots that can do things much faster and cheaper than human hands. Should we not build those robots in order to protect American jobs? China is already building millions of robots to replace human workers. So what happens to America’s global competitiveness when other countries use robots and other forms of advanced technology while we don’t?
    Clearly there is no alternative to doing things in the