North Star Writers Group

The movement of labor is much in the news these days, be it in the form of outsourcing jobs to places like India and China or the loss of same to the presence of cheap illegal immigrant labor here in America. In both situations, you often see people angry at the prospect or the reality of losing a job to someone else who can and will do it more cheaply – which in turn makes the business more profitable.

I must confess that I have not understood this feeling. Since when should we presume that we are more entitled to a decent living than someone living in New Delhi, or someone who came here willing to accept an opportunity that we'd consider beneath us? Moreover, why on Earth would any employer pay any more for quality labor than he or she has to? We wouldn't pay more for a good or service than we have to, so why do we expect businesses to?

The economic truth here is that business always seeks, and tends to locate itself in, the places where the best labor for the least cost is found – just as we consumers patronize stores with the best products at the lowest price. And if America has made itself into a place where the cost of labor is so expensive that business must either move overseas or break the law to hire illegal immigrants, we have only our socialist Big Government policies to blame for it. The answer is not to demonize companies for moving to more lucrative locations or desperate people for doing desperate things. It is, rather, to lower the cost of doing business and reverse the economic incentives that cause these behaviors in the first place. Consider:

Outsourcing. This one is so simple, it's hard to believe we keep missing it. More often than not, when jobs wind up in Asia, it's not because a company salivates at the thought of slave labor. It's because the cost of taxes, regulation, litigation and increasingly employee benefits (i.e. health care and pensions) here in America have grown so onerous that relocation has become the more profitable option. The reaction should not be to hate the company, nor to whine at our own loss, but to cut taxes, reduce the regulatory burden (which in reality are all hidden taxes), reduce litigation and stop demanding Cadillac benefit plans. When General Motors can accurately be described, based on their expenses, as a health-care insurer that also happens to manufacture cars and trucks, you know things have been turned upside down.

Illegal Immigration. Again, this one is more simple than one might think. It's really the same answer as above, though in this case, the shrinking of government would take the form of not allowing illegals to live off public schools, hospitals, welfare and so on, which is what makes the lower wage they accept livable. Additionally, we need to enforce as written two laws that have been going completely unenforced. One is to check out companies and prosecute any found to be using illegal labor. The other is to secure the border, completely and totally. This will elicit loud screams from the usual suspects in the racial-grievance industry, but it is simply the firm enforcement of standing law. There is nothing racist and should be nothing controversial about that. The combination of reducing the cost of domestic labor, the stopping of taxpayer-funded services that make a low wage livable for illegal immigrants, the incentive of punishment for using illegal labor and the keeping from coming here of those who shouldn't be here in the first place will change the dynamics completely.

Of course, there is one addendum to all of this. You're going to have to fight everyone who has come to benefit from the current system being set up the way it is now. This arrangement didn't just appear out of nothingness. It was set up deliberately and for selfish reasons. Outsourced and immigrant labor is merely the logical economic response to it – at times, in fact, a necessity if a business is to survive.

So we have a choice to make. We can have huge government that increases the cost of doing business and watch jobs get sent to India or given to Mexicans, or we can have a smaller and less costly one, enforce laws as written (and borders as drawn) and keep jobs and the living they provide us here.

But perhaps the first step is to show a little humility in accepting that we are not more entitled to a living than anyone else in the world, and that even though we are America and the biggest economy there is, it is still possible to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs if we are selfish and not careful. If we honestly think we can escape the inevitable consequences of our poorer choices, we are in for a rude awakening.

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This is Column # DKK39. Request permission to publish here.