"N2EY" wrote in message
...
In article k.net, "Bill
Sohl" writes:

There's no sign that any sufficient number of folks in
the USA are going to boycott non-USA made products
or spend N dollars more to get a product "made in the USA'
as opposed to buying a cheaper imported product.

That can change, though.

In the long run, those currently
cheap off shore labor markets will self adjust upwards.

Maybe. And if so, might they not find themselves in the same boat?

Like I said, global economy.

As long as we're not on a sinking ship..

In the short
run, US labor has their head in the sand if they think there's
something
either party (Dems or Reps) can really do to stem the shift of
manufacturing jobs overseas. The same thing is going on in Europe.

OTOH, unemployed workers can't buy the goods anyway. So what good are
lower prices?

In the long run, employees must be constantly reevaluating their
job skills and looking at the prospect of how vulnerable their job
may be as to their job being farmed out to off shore labor.

That's true up to a point. But how often is it reasonable to expect a
person to retrain? And what happens to "the wealth of nations" in the
meantime?

You retrain whenever it becomes necessary. There's nothing
mystical about it. If your job skill goes wanting, you'd
better find another skill set.

How often is reasonable and practical? A lot of things cannot be learned
overnight. Inexperience and the lack of judgement that can result pose
major
threats.

Consider the overall change in technology for almost anything.
Wholesale change almost every 15/20 years. If I hadn't had the
opportunity to learn semiconductors via additional training in the
Navy (1967) and then a full array of digital theory and application
compliments of "ma bell", I'd probably be pushing a broom
somewhere.

And who pays for the retraining?

It depends. Even in telecommunications, the old days of heavy
training costs per employee are gone.

I don't know of any country that grew prosperous on a service economy
alone.

We still manufacture and produce in the USA, it is just
done with more and more automation resulting in less
and less need for skilled labor.

We manufacture and produce some things, but much of the production -
automated
and all - is moving to places like China.

And the concept of planned obsolescence has been reinvented....

The obsolescence isn't planned...it just happens. Look at the
ever newer, faster and more memory for PCs. Consider too that
a few years back, marketing considered anything under $300
to be an "impulse buy" (i.e. no real thought as to price vs value
is applied by the consumer).

Cheers,
Bill K2UNK