Read Online How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds (Counterpunch) by Paul Craig Roberts - Free Book Online Page B

the new technologies. The skills required to operate new processes call forth investment in education and training. As U.S. manufacturing and R&D move abroad, Indian and Chinese engineering enrollments rise, and U.S. enrollments decline.
    The process is a unified whole. It is not possible for a country to lose parts of the process and hold on to other parts. That is why the “new economy” was a hoax from the beginning. As Popkin and Kobe note, new technologies, new manufacturing processes, and new designs take place where things are made. The notion that the U.S. can lose everything else but hold on to innovation is absurd.
    Someone needs to tell Congress before they waste yet more borrowed money. In an adjoining column to the N.A.M. report on innovation, the February 6, 2006, Manufacturing & Technology News reports that “the U.S. Senate is jumping on board the competitiveness issue.” The Bush regime and the doormat Congress have come together in the belief that the U.S. can keep its edge in science and technology if the federal government spends $9 billion a year to “fund innovative, big-payoff ideas that have the potential to transform the U.S. economy.”
    The utter stupidity of the “Protecting America’s Competitive Edge Act” (PACE) is obvious. The tremendous labor cost advantage of doing things abroad will equally apply to any new “big-payoff ideas” as it does to the goods and services currently outsourced. Moreover, U.S. research is open-sourced. It is available to anyone. As the Cox Commission Report made clear, there are a large number of Chinese front companies in the U.S. for the sole purpose of collecting technology. PACE will simply be another U.S. taxpayer subsidy to the rising Asian economies.
    The assertion that we hear every day that America is falling behind because it doesn’t produce enough science, mathematics, and engineering graduates is a bald-faced lie. The problem is always brought back to education failures in K–12, that is, to more education subsidies. When CEOs say they can’t find American engineers, they mean they cannot find Americans who will work for Chinese or Indian wages. That is what the so-called “shortage” is all about.
    I receive a constant stream of emails from unemployed and underemployed engineers with many years of experience and advanced degrees. Many have been out of work for years. They describe the movement of their jobs offshore or their replacement by foreigners brought in on work visas. Many no longer even know American engineers who are employed in the profession. Some are now working in sawmills, others in Home Depot, and others are attempting to eke out a living as consultants. Many describe lost homes, broken marriages, even imprisonment for inability to make child support payments.
    Many ask me how economists can be so blind to reality. Here is my answer: Many economists are bought and paid for by outsourcers. Most of the studies claiming to prove that Americans benefit from outsourcing are done by economic consulting firms hired by outsourcers. Or they are done by think tanks or university professors dependent on corporate donors. Or they reflect the ideology of “free market economists” who are committed to the belief that “freedom” is good and always produces good results. Since outsourcing is merely the freedom of property to act in its interest, and since this self-interest is always guided by an invisible hand to the greater welfare of everyone, outsourcing, ipso facto, is good for America. Anyone who doesn’t think so is a fascist who wants to take away the rights of property. Seriously, this is what passes for analysis among “free market economists.” Economists’ commitment to their “reality” is destroying the ladders of upward mobility that made America the land of opportunity. It is just as destructive as the neocons’ commitment to their “reality” that is driving the U.S. deeper into war in the Middle East.
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