If there were less workers than there was work, I might agree with your assessment. It is true that moving manufacturing to Africa would be the best thing that happened to that continent.

However, there is the problem of the amount of work. Let me give my example. I'm now in my 22nd year in the film business and I've weathered more than my fare share of work slowdowns. And I've watched how the industry works. I've seen producers move into a state, offer low wages with the promise of more work in the future. We took the jobs, because they brought the type of work we wanted to do. As the years (usually 3-4) went on and we started commanding more money, producers moved on, and the process started yet again, somewhere else, as those of us left behind scrambled to make it. Many of us fell out.

In the 80's and 90's, they started moving to Canada. Each locale becomes enamored of the money a film production infuses into an economy (it's a very capital intensive business)and creates tax incentives to bring films there. But the labor cycle keeps happening. Canada has been losing a lot of film business and now they're going to Australia and New Zealand and Eastern Europe. (A quick side note: It's a good thing that Peter Jackson is doing for New Zealand, but I'll place bets about how long it will last.)

Now, because of a variety of reasons, this process is happening again in the states, as I've just been experiencing as the state I live in now is getting its place in the sun. The problem is, I'm making less now than when I started.

Admittedly, film is a little different, not requiring the capital investment that manufacturing or agriculture requires. But, since I'm not allowed to get job re-training because "my business isn't effected by globalization," I see a different possibility than you posit.

I have to admit that when I got home yesterday and when hearing on the radio, first thing, that Milton Friedman was dead, I broke into a spontaneous (no, really) chorus of "Ding, dong the witch is dead."

For all the notes, postings, etc. that have been posted that spout about his love of personal freedom, there is a question that is buried in your essay. The first government to adopt Neo-Liberal economic policies, and the government he continued to advise, was Chile. That is, Pinochet's Chile. For all his arguing that true freedom is found in economic freedom (and he did write a large popular book that made just this argument), then how can he ever justify his direct involvement in one of the most oppressive governments in the western hemisphere.

This is not the place to argue with the many problems with his economic theories, though our current economic situation (with stagnant to falling real wages, disappearing manufacturing base, disappearing middle class) should at least be cause for pause. For further (and better than I can provide) economic arguments, I will point to the Post-Autistic economics movement (it's google-able, as it were). But this history of Chile should cause all of us to pause when reading yet another glowing tribute.

In a country that depends on consumption for the continuance of our economy (our president once again encouraged shopping as he did after 9/11 as if it was the primary patriotic duty), no one seems to comment on the connection between consumers wanting (or more likely needing) lower prices and the employment practices of Wal-Mart and others.

Someone, in an earlier comment quoted Henry Ford, who saw the connection between his workers and consumption. Twenty to thirty years ago, a (union) factory job was middle class. When those workers weren't working, they were consuming houses, cars, boats, campers, TVs, etc. By now, we all know about stagnating wages and the shrinking of the middle class. What doesn't ever seem to be connected is how these moves towards "a flexible work force" is precisely the same move that causes consumers to want cheaper prices.

Wal-mart creates its own consumers and then generates more of those consumers who not only want or chose lower prices, but actively need them as their earning power lowers. I think that the usual argument around the "rational consumer who choses lower prices" is essentially problematic, in that it separates the consumer from the act of earning the money necessary to consume.

As a last note, I would note something I have noticed, though there would be a great study in it somewhere (one that might even prove me wrong). As someone who works (peripherally) in advertising, I tend to pay attention to ads. It seems to me that we are seeing a division that is somewhat new. Ads are now aimed at either the lower price, where most of us live as our earnings have shrunk, and the Lexis consumer, the earners who have seen their earnings increase by creating consumers who can only afford to shop at Wal-mart.