RE MERE JOBS CREATION AMERICAN INDUSTRY ECONOMIC NATIONALISM AND YOU

Government jobs creation has long been thought to be a bad ideal, by the private sector which considers government efforts in that direction doomed to failure.


In the latter half of the 20th century, when foreign labor has been a fraction of the cost of ours, they have had a point but not the one they argued above.


The point is, why employ Americans in a global system, at all, any more? 


Good point. The private sector has been voting with its feet, because our open system allows off shoring of any job almost. 


Jobs are not necessarily done better abroad, but the story long was that government jobs here are not done as well as jobs in the private sector here. 


When off shoring picked up, that story added: private sector labor here had wrong skill sets, etc.; when the actual reasons re off shoring were mainly cheaper labor, and less regulation of any kind.

The other big point in this history has been one of failure to innovate at home where off shoring has been available as an alternative to innovation at home. Allowing US promotion of willy nilly very large scale foreign investment, industrialization, and accompanying training and technology transfer, has generally been politically and economically disastrous for the US in the long run, while it often served short term Presidential strategic and diplomatic pretexts and initiatives. 

American industry, over the same period since WW II, has also been woefully unable, slothful, indolent, chauvinistic, and short sighted, re reform, in the face of the pace of change in methods. Part of that has to do with the laissez faire system itself, with is short term profitability criteria themselves, the other with cheaper production as an alternative to innovation at home.

So, it hardly a question merely of creating government 'jobs', at this point, as had been the case during the Depression.

One needs, rather, a redevelopmental industrial, trade, and commercial policy, 


not merely government spending on make work jobs to try to jump start the same backward and fragmented politicoeconomic system that has gotten us here and will continue in short order to tank completely in the face of the forces we unleashed with modern globalization after WW II. 

In order to have 

a redevelopmental industrial, trade, and commercial policy here one needs a more rational, economic nationalistic, 

political structure than the one we have always had.

(Not, incidentally, politically or militarily isolationist economic nationalism; these terms are often subverted; if you are not for free trade, if you are an economic nationalist, you must somehow be an 'isolationist'; plenty of liberal globalist free traders are globalists, ostensibly for dovish Cobdenist reasons; there are also globalist liberal free trade human rights 'hawks', so to speak. 


Additionally, they usually blindly criticize economic nationalism as 'protectionist', a pejorative, implying an inherent domestic industrial and commercial inefficiency, as against Smithian invisible hand comparative advantage efficiency. The 20th century has shown the obsolescence and disastrousness of Smithian comparative advantage and laissez faire concepts, however.) 

I do not believe that Americans will move in that direction, that of political reforms directed toward redevelopmental economic nationalism, as I have said before, for a lot of reasons.