Import restrictions? Laws penalizing outsourcing? Massive tariffs? Tell me how they'd stick a finger in this particular dike.

The fact is that there are billions of eager, hardworking and intelligent people out there who still have a hell of a work ethic. This has been coming for a long, long time.

The day is gone where someone with a limited education in America could get a good union job, and get paid enough for turning a bolt on an assembly line to buy a house, raise a family, and send a kid to college. That this is the inevitable result of market processes doesn't make it any easier on that guy or his family. Jerry Pournelle has discussed this at great length, and has fears for our society if we edge the blue-collar middle class out of the picture. I don't have all the answers for this, either. I take some comfort in the fact that new types of work keep being invented. A large number of the jobs being done by Americans today didn't even exist thirty years ago.

I do know that the Democrats are going to have to come up with realistic answers if they want to discuss this. "Republicans suck" is starting to get a bit old as a debating point for them, and you might have noticed that Kerry couldn't get elected on it either.