I'm an Austrian who rarely agrees with the Keynesian Krugman, but I do agree with this part:
Two weeks ago, The Washington Post reported that Bain had invested in companies whose specialty was helping other companies move jobs overseas. The Romney campaign went ballistic, demanding — unsuccessfully — that The Post retract the report on the basis of an unconvincing “fact sheet” consisting largely of executive testimonials.What was more interesting was the campaign’s insistence that The Post had misled readers by failing to distinguish between “offshoring” — moving jobs abroad — and “outsourcing,” which simply means having an external contractor perform services that could have been performed in-house.Now, if the Romney campaign really believed in its own alleged free-market principles, it would have defended the right of corporations to do whatever maximizes their profits, even if that means shipping jobs overseas. Instead, however, the campaign effectively conceded that offshoring is bad but insisted that outsourcing is O.K. as long as the contractor is another American firm.
If you are to embrace free-market principles, you must accept the bad parts along with the good. I do not like offshoring, but I cannot advocate to make it illegal and still claim to be an Austrian.
And there are bad things about free-market/Austrian economics; to claim there is a perfect system is silly. I do not feel that a true free market--an Austrian system--would be perfect; I just think it would be the best system we can come up with in a realistic world. It checks and balances itself; Keynesian systems depend on the gov't to force "checks and balances."
I refer to the Harvard Business Review article I posted a couple of weeks ago, about how America needs leaders who stop trying to take us back to a nostalgic vision of "the way things were"--that's not going to happen; even if Ron Paul got elected, this would not happen--and instead look to make this country work in the new economy that is our reality. Like it or not, offshoring is one of those realities. That genie is out of the bottle, and it's not going back in. We need to stop screaming and cursing at it and deal with it.