Thomas Friedman, "Made in the World": It's Raining Twaddle at The New York Times

It's raining twaddle at The New York Times.

In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Made in the World" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/friedman-made-in-the-world.html?ref=opinion), Thomas Friedman makes the case for global outsourcing. Friedman refers to a February 2011 meeting between Obama and Apple's Steve Jobs:

"The president, understandably, asked Jobs why almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were made overseas. Obama inquired, couldn’t that work come back home? 'Those jobs aren’t coming back,' Jobs replied."

Moreover, Friedman sees no danger in US outsourcing of manufacturing, owing to talented immigrants arriving on America's shores, IP protection, secure capital markets, high returns on innovation, government funding of new techology, and logistics jobs available to middle-class workers.

So the US should forfeit its manufacturing muscle and enjoy the cheap benefits of Chinese and Pakistani slave labor (see: http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/2012/01/thomas-friedman-average-is-over-when.html), and the middle-class should be content with finding work with FedEx and U.P.S. Sorry, but I will never accept this, even if it means doubling the price of iPhones.

Friedman concludes:

"If only — if only — we could come together on a national strategy to enhance and expand all of our natural advantages: more immigration, most post-secondary education, better infrastructure, more government research, smart incentives for spurring millions of start-ups — and a long-term plan to really fix our long-term debt problems — nobody could touch us. We’re that close."

Or in other words, Friedman would have the US spend trillions of dollars on a dozen different programs while somehow reducing long-term debt. "We're that close"? Yeah, right. For now, I would prefer to see the US provide incentives to keep manufacturing jobs in the US and to allow ordinary families, which cannot find work in hi-tech, to put food on their tables and pay their mortgages.

This is one instance where Obama is right.

[No, I haven't developed a soft spot for Obama. During the Procrastinator-in-Chief's February meeting mentioned by Dowd, Jobs, according to Ryan Lizza in an article in The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=all), "was most annoyed by Obama’s pessimism—he seemed to dismiss every idea Jobs proffered. 'The president is very smart,' Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. 'But he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done. It infuriates me.'"]