This is lifted completely from the national Review's blog. I think it explains a lot:
It was most unfortunate that these people lost their jobs, and my heart went out to them. At the same time, however, aggressive cost-cutting helped stabilize our business during a shaky period. Stockholders saw we were serious about increasing profit margins, and bought accordingly. Our stock has risen 60% in the past eight months.
The remaining three thousand employees of the company have benefited greatly. We still have jobs, the company has a very viable future, and most of us are going to have more discretionary income from raises and rising stock prices. Occasionally sacrifices need to be made for the good of the team. As Spock would say, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
The trade argument is caught up in reductionism and demagoguery. The fact of the matter is that outsourcing is a reality and protectionism is unrealistic. What you can do is create better environment for it to occur in. Workers should have three month notice on outsourcing since it's a planned act. As Robert Reich has suggested, outsourcing costs should not be total write-offs but slightly taxed to create a fund that would retrain workers and help with unemployment benefits. We really need to begin talking about how to face outsourcing rather than how to prevent it or why to support it. The latter conversation is just hot-air as we can't control the global marketplace without destroying international trade. The former is about what we can do; how we can help those who are free trade's causualties and how we can keep our workers a few steps ahead of expendability.
Edited because the post evolved away from its title.
Kristof has a great column today hitting back at the protectionism that some in our party seem to be flirting with. The fact of the matter is that it'd be nice if the rest of the world had to abide by American labor standards, but the fact of the matter is that the rest of the world isn't American, and as such, they can't possibly do that. Read the column, it's a damn important picture of how the people the Left thinks they're protecting actually feel about our intervention...
A Franco-Japanese alliance? The Japanese are refusing to take imports of American frozen french fries, because many are fried in beef tallow.
It may be the first time anyone's added to the neoconservative hit list because of a dispute over convenience foods.