Outsourcing and Globalization

This is an essay I wrote for my Social Issues class. It is meant as a response to Thomas Friedman's documentary "The Other Side of Outsourcing", but I got a little carried away.


On Our Knees

For years the U.S. has lavished in the luxury of a reign on high among the globalized world. We’ve been the vanguard of innovation; we’ve lead the way in to the information age; we’ve given the gift of prosperity through commerce to countless people; and the world has benefited tremendously from it, but now we are made to face the consequences of our actions. Now we are made to, in the eyes of our politicians, Suffer. Through brainwashing of the plebian masses, those too foolish to question their propaganda otherwise, our nation’s misguided sovereign have successfully turned us against the world. In their corrupting addresses to the proletariat, they are quick to denounce the prosperity for all parties brought on by the outsourcing of jobs, ensuring the tenebriation of any information countering their claims after they’ve walked behind the curtain. But they do naught but destroy their own. This nation has fallen; it has buckled under the crushing pressure of a changing world, and now, still under the rule of blind, old fools, it can do nothing but wither and die on its knees. It is until this nation is made to see, is pushed to the brink of utter economic and political failure, it can never prosper the way it once did. The way it still dreams it can.

Ruled by the aged, the nation walks by aged beliefs. It is guided by archaic principles in a world that does not condone such. Constantly, our figureheads champion a false crusade of protectionism – a campaign to save domestic jobs from fleeing overseas. Fools, all of them. It can be heard, the world around, that keeping jobs within our borders, by keeping our citizens employed in jobs that are kept by force and subsidies, that our economy will rise again. Wrong. By human nature, we desire the most for the least; we operate on self-interest. To ensnare vocations being sent overseas, to tie them down here with government charity and regulations, we exacerbate a skewing of basic economic principles, an act that leads only to the drastic weakening of an economy. To compete in the global market, a company must seek out the best work for the most efficient cost, or your population will pay the price. By trapping them within our borders, this process is tampered with, causing prices to, ultimately, rise and consumers to suffer.

Even those free from the misguided ideologies of the generations past have set themselves on a course of degradation and self-destruction; and they did it all by themselves. The youthful populace of today’s America may not suffer the idiosyncrasies of their leaders, but they have done a superb job of stupefying and damning themselves. They, lost in their own laughably simplistic worlds, have rejected education and, though they may not see it through the fog they have lost themselves in, the future that it can bestow upon them. And to speak of those who still exert effort in their continued learning, there are many who lack any semblance of appreciation for what they are being so graciously gifted. In both guilty parties there exists a feeling, a certain belief that these privileges are entitled to them, that college degrees and graduate programs are entitled to them, that a job is entitled to them. They have become so enthralled with themselves that they refuse to learn the languages of those whom, in the future age of commerce, they will be required to interact with; nay, they scorn those who would even suggest learning a language that is not their own. Blinded by pride, they, too, will fall. On the other side of the world, there are children in India and Africa, who have never held a textbook, who are receiving laptops and using them to gain education. Those are the children who will succeed, and they will do so because they truly appreciate and are fully absorbing everything that is being given to them. Those are the children who will, in a globally competitive market, earn the jobs that Americans are complaining, like the asinine fools that they are, about losing. We are so incredibly foolish. We are so misguided. We are sniveling and crying for low prices and the next hot technology, not realizing that overseas workers are the sole reason that prices are low, and that we are no longer the ones producing the technology, and then we have the idiotic, hypocritical gall to bitch and moan about losing our jobs, and we aren’t even putting in the effort to earn them back.

The world is no longer hundreds of countries. It is no longer millions and billions of people of different races. We are one world. We are one race. We have become one market, and we have to open our eyes and see this. Americans are no longer competing against themselves. The world is the battlefield now, and it’s every man for himself, and for our citizens who are too feint hearted to understand this, they will perish. Survival of the Fittest will ensure that. Jobs will move to the place where it will be most profitable for the business, and people must be prepared to follow them. They must be prepared to learn more. They must be prepared to give more. Everything has a cost, and jobs are no exception. Those with experience will often say that the world is harsh, unforgiving, vicious, the world isn’t fair. Progress has given us a mandate: this we must learn again. If we are to survive in our age of exponential expansion, we must be prepared to sacrifice.

With the boundaries of nations broken, with the chains of race shattered, with the chasm of language traversed, our world is evolving. Every day, the global market is getting larger, and every day, the world itself, getting smaller. The rest of the globalized world has realized this. America has not. We have not. Until we shed our erroneous ideologies of protectionism, entitlement and archaism we will never – we can never – advance. We are on our knees on our own faults. Still, we aren’t beyond saving. But if we want to save ourselves, we cannot afford to be proud of the shortcomings we perceive as progress. To rise, we must step in to the future. To rise, we must share ourselves with the world and allow them to share in return. To rise, we must change our rules. To succeed, we must change ourselves.