It is no secret that American jobs have been shipped overseas, many of them to China. The reason for this is obvious: low labor costs. Left to their own devices, companies will drive down the cost of labor in order to increase profits. What would you expect? Their job is to make profits for their shareholders.
Capitalism is an economic system that produces economic growth, along with a host of negative side effects. In the United States, organized labor and government regulation have helped to mitigate those side effects. History has shown that this kind of regulated free enterprise is humanity's best hope for economic progress.
As soon as a global economy emerged, things changed. The world has reverted to a system that is more like nineteenth century capitalism than anything else. Organized labor has lost its clout, as companies simply moved production overseas. We still have the free enterprise, but the regulation has disappeared. This is not good.
The New York Times recently reported an interesting development in China: there is new pressure to raise pay and improve labor conditions. According to the report, this could cause some companies to shift production elsewhere. But we shouldn't get excited about this, because the jobs won't be coming here. They will go wherever in the world labor is the cheapest.
Don't you see what has happened? We have a global economic system, but no global labor laws, no global environmental standards, no global rights for workers.
Al Gore articulated the first inconvenient truth of our time. Here is the second: we cannot survive on this planet without a global democratic world government. We have to have global political institutions to match the globalization of nearly everything else. There is just no other way.
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