A simplier strategy might be to reduce the cost of doing business in America. I read an article last week about the cost of federal regulatory compliance. It stated that for a small business, the average per employee cost of compliance was $7000 per year. These costs included things like mandatory workers compensation insurance, compliance with paperwork requirements, environmental regulation compliance, OSHA compliance, and the like. For large companies, the average was well over $4000 per employee per year. These costs were over and above the cost of benefits such as health insurance. Throw in the cost of litigation and insurance, and the costs here in America are even higher. That puts American corporations and workers at a disadvantage to foreign workers. Some form of tort reform could go a long way towards reducing the competitive disadvantage of trying to run a business in America.

Especially when it comes to manufacturing, American workers often get paid far more than their foreign counterparts. The higher productivity of American workers goes a long way towards offsetting the higher wages. Much of the higher productivity comes from the use of expensive machine tools. For example, one of my brothers is a master machinist and welder. It can make economic sense to pay $250,000 for a computerized machine tool when you're paying a machinist $30+ an hour as opposed to making him do everything with the old manual tools. Not only is the quality much more consistent, the production volume is many times higher. It might make less economic sense if the machinist was only being paid a couple dollars and hour.

There's another area that has received some attention recently. According to a recent column by George Will, Chicago used to be the candy manufacturing capital of America, employing over 15,000 people. Today, the industry is less than half that size and is shrinking rapidly. One of the big factors is the high price of sugar due to tariffs and other federal interference. Protectionism for one industry such as sugar or steel drives up the costs of doing business in America and frequently kill far more jobs in affected industries than they save in the protected ones. Walter Williams has more on the topic.