In an “economic forum” she raised that question. I wonder if she would have wanted to keep all those farming jobs in the 19th/20th century when they shifted to more industrial, productive jobs.
Friedman made a great point about this, he argued that when people lose jobs due to outsouring or whatever, what its actually doing is freeing up the labor supply to work on something more productive… I hope mccain argues this point…People need to see that liberals are not pro-worker at all.
Why would a liberal agrue this point? He will say he would do a better job at keeping those jobs. Pun intended.
The way I see it is how Bastiat described the situation of labour:
We all have obstacles we need to overcome. But on our own it is very difficult, sometimes impossible, to overcome them all, so we specialise in something, and trade for the other things we need. In effect, I specialise in removing one obstacle, you specialise in removing another, and we then help each other.
If at some point in time, some sort of invention helps to reduce the amount of labour necessary to remove an obstacle, or if someone in another country is willing to remove our obstacles for us at a lower cost, then this is a great boon to us all. It frees up our time, enabling us to deal with other obstacles we did not have the time for before, and makes everyone better off.
When viewed that way, protecting jobs becomes almost absurd.