by

John Wright

My wife and I were discussing the difference between outsourcing and offshoring this morning. In conventional terminology the first is hiring contractors from anywhere for temporary assignments and the second is hiring full-time employees in a foreign location. One might outsource domestically or offshore but "offshoring" as a strategy means setting up an office or larger facility in a foreign country to house your new permanent lower cost employees. The idea is that you will get better personnel loyalty in your offshore operations if you actually employ people full-time.

Perhaps. It seems to me that opportunity to advance drives capable people to seek the best available positions. Offshore, better available positions are a continuing reality as nations like China and India develop business and industrial infrastructure. Loyalty is long dead in both directions since employers abdicated paternal roles in our careers in the USA starting in the 1980’s. There is no reason to expect loyalty from foreign employees as they have quickly become true capitalists and have no history of loyalty in a paternalistic setting, Japan excluded. Today only a fool thinks in terms of loyalty in either group. This is especially true where one’s employer is from a different culture.

One "duh" subject led to another, and another and soon all roads led to the same place in our thinking. That place was one of fundamental attitude about life and in particular the value and rights of people. There are those who believe that ability/labor should be purchased or rented for the smallest possible cost. Is that not sensible capitalism? That belief is often accompanied by other related beliefs. One is that ability and motivation to gain wealth is the essential determinant of who should have wealth, the converse being that lack of ability or motivation should be punished with comparative poverty. Another is that the amount of wealth one might have should be unlimited and based only on the ability of the individual or company to gain it. That is to say, there should be no requirements to consider needs of employees or contractors or customers or even the wellbeing of the nation-state beyond that which is market driven.

Accumulated wealth should not be taxed in any manner at any time, because it was fairly and intelligently "earned" as a result of forward thinking and hard work. This is why tax laws have changed in the last fifty years to permit wealthy individuals and corporations to pay a proportionately small amount of tax while the burden on ordinary citizens has increased significantly in percentage. This is also why the classical conservative Republican position is to decrease "size of government," which means curtail entitlement programs, cut government costs and leave the holdings of the wealthy intact. It applies to corporations (accelerated depreciations, tax reduction incentives, ability to expense items that formerly had to be capitalized, etc.) and individuals (inheritance tax reduction, high-end marginal tax bracket rate decreases, high capital gains exclusions).

Lack of ability and/or lack of motivation typically results in individuals and the offspring they create to be drains on society. Where one might have been employable as a poorly paid laborer seventy years ago with no entitlement programs, today there is essentially no need for the unproductive or low ability people in our society and we have expensive entitlement programs. The low potential people have been moved from low potential to no potential due to automation, except for the most menial poor paying jobs, and those too will be disappearing (McDonalds®). These people do, however, reproduce to excess and create nothing of value in the advancement of society, including their offspring.

It is from understanding the non-essentiality of the lesser ability people combined with their ever-growing needs and wants for goods and services that one grasps the fundamental reason for the highly polarized and self-centered position of the wealthy. There is obvious imbalance between the needs and the ability to provide for those needs that is the true segregator in our society, indeed in all societies all over the world. This reality has always been with us but today the relative percentage of non-essential people in the total population continues to rise sharply. Only a fool would see it otherwise today. This realized fundamental value position opposite the undeniable reality of extreme differences in ability across the population is seen in the manifestation of polarized capitalism, which works economically for a few but not socially or economically for the many. Now how about tomorrow?

Anything short of collapse of civilization across the planet yields one and only one scenario as we move into the future. We will depend on an ever-smaller percentage of Humanity to provide for all goods and services for everyone, because: 1) Only a very small percentage will be able to contribute based on what they own (their wealth) or on fundamental intelligence, which must be ever higher to contribute to advancement, and 2) Automation will eliminate today’s low, medium and even some high skill jobs. Those who today have reasonably good jobs in the USA within industry, teaching and even medical services will find most of those jobs and many others disappearing with the progression of automation and continued outsourcing and offshoring.

Having considered the value system basis for the beliefs of the wealthy, it is necessarily fair to consider the corresponding value system(s) for those who are not wealthy by virtue of lack of ability or motivation to compete. The most obvious value of the poor and/or limited person is that their very existence is sufficient grounds for them to enjoy the fruits of this planet that no man created. They are, as it were, children of God as much as any person, and thus entitled to fair treatment and an equitable share of all there is in the societies. It is hard to argue with the fact that no man created our planet or essentially anything on it from which we all draw our sustenance, thus, no man has any inherent claim to deny any other man use of all our resources, equitably.

The idea is that unearned ability to create, i.e. the gift of inherited intelligence, or inherited wealth, is not a suitable reason for economic segregation, and certainly not a license to commit most of the human race to relative poverty. From this basis we got socialism and communism which do not work economically but are attractive socially. So now we are caught squarely in the middle with the issue of who owns the rights to enjoy everything on our planet? Is it a matter of having to earn that right or is it a given right to all people born? Does it belong only to the very intelligent or the very wealthy, in proportion to their intelligence or wealth, or is an unearned advantage actually a responsibility to help and support those less capable?

It is indeed unfortunate that both polarized groups have unrealistic beliefs and absurd behaviors. I never was a socialist. I believed in the concept that people should progress based on their sense of responsibility for self and intelligent hard work. Yet I also acknowledged that it is wrong to take food from hungry people just to enhance personal wealth.

I solved all the various dilemmas when I wrote my book, Destiny, which I published five years ago. The silence since that time is deafening. I have literally heard not one person speak publicly to the tasks I outlined for our present day survival and our longer-term advancement. I have instead seen more polarization that will lead to stupid destruction of our economic lives and our environment.

I doubt that readers remember in any detail the essentiality of and methods for population control, i.e., control of demand on resources. All political moves I have seen since then speak only to more wealth for the wealthy with no regard whatever for the world they are creating for our next generation. Fools still whine about our playing God with genetic engineering. Little do they realize that without that mandatory change they will be spending all their time making war and praying for a decent life in about twenty years.

Meanwhile the ignorant simply go on doing what ignorant people do … make more ignorant, essentially useless people. The wealthy keep devising new ways to strip money from the ignorant poor, e.g. more enticing casino and lottery gambling, absurd credit card interest rates, lower paying jobs with few if any benefits (Wal-Mart®). Government is doing nothing useful at all in terms of our economy (which really means how many of us are well employed --- there is no other valid definition --- smoke that in your pipe, Mister Greenspan!). Government is allowing companies to slit our throats with offshoring and outsourcing to foreign countries. Government is making us poor with stupid war. Government squandered such monies as we contributed for our entitlement programs.

Other countries will prosper, further grow their populations and learn to consume as we have done. And the environment? Have we not done enough damage already with our petroleum addiction? And now we are exporting that addiction instead of developing effective alternative energy. Are you starting to remember reading about these real concerns in Destiny?

So, who are the enemies? Know Thine Enemies … they are both the wealthy who have no regard for anyone economically except themselves, and the very poor who in ignorance also have no regard for anyone as evidenced by their reproductive behaviors. As the wealthy control the government and have the requisite intelligence to force whatever changes they deem appropriate I must declare the wealthy to be, today, our mortal enemies. Yes, by default your government has become your mortal enemy as you have left it in the hands of the wealthy corporations who you allow to remain in business at your expense, even as they export your jobs. Unless you do something definitive to change the course of the USA through our laws then, alas, it turns out that you are the real enemy.