> At the same time the "middle class" purchasing power when it comes to important thing isn't that far off from that of the lower class of the past. yes they can buy big flat screen tv's for cheap now but more important things have started to become an issue despite rapid technological advancement.

You are drawing a causal line between correlated events.

The middle class globally has been weakened since the 80s.

One of the current issues we are contending with is the fact that wealth has concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

America recently had a year where the top 10% of earners drove nearly 50% of consumer spending.

We could spend the entirety of the conversation discussing wealth concentration, and it would still be a worthwhile digression.

You can’t have a consumer driven market if the consumers don’t have anything to purchase with.

However, when you dismiss flat screen TVs offhandedly also does your own argument a disservice. By deciding what is important and what is not, you are taking on the role of arbiter of subjective merit.

This is fine, but then you have to also make arguments for how the economic incentives must be aligned to achieve your subjective goals.

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From what I have said, you should know that I am sympathetic to the motivations behind your argument. I am not sympathetic to bad arguments.

Protectionism is fatal to economies, and simply tanks your drive. The ability of MNCs to just offshore work should be benign, but appears malignant. If work is offshored, it should also result in more productivity or higher productivity in the nation it is offshored from.

You should see higher tax revenues as a result, which should be plowed back into your local economy.

Weirdly, our economies seem to all be becoming more productive, but not much richer.

This is one of the reasons I sincerely recommend exporting labour standards more aggressively. At least you are not at a disadvantage because you have actual labour protections, and it reduces the value of labour arbitrage.

The other issue is retraining doesn’t work at the speed and scales changes happen. Our brains are not flexible enough to retrain miners into programmers and have them find jobs which are equally well paying.

If we had a number for how much retraining we can actually achieve, or how much time it would take, we could figure out how much we can outsource before it becomes impossible to retrain our citizens.