Who's the moron on my TV?
Rough day today - I'm flying to Southern California tomorrow at a wholly unreasonable hour. 730,000 acres on fire (according to CBS News) and I'm headed right for the middle of it. I came home to pack, eat dinner and watch some TV - but on the way to the Cavs game I got stuck on the Lou Dobbs show. Perhaps he just wasn't at his most polite.
I came in at the middle of the show, so I missed his performances before interviewing someone from the Haas School of Business (Laura d'Andrea Tyson, the Dean of the school, I think).
At any rate, the first words I hear him say are something like: "Many businesses are making the decision to move their labor to whatever country has the lowest cost of labor. That doesn't sound like a business decision worthy of a business degree to me. Does it to you?"
She spends a good three or four seconds just looking at him. I don't know what was going through her head, but I had two thoughts almost concurrently:
- Immigration is too complex a subject to be summed up so cavalierly. Jobs moving overseas are symptoms of structural policy flaws in the country losing the jobs - relocating a plant isn't a decision made based solely on the fact that the wages nearby are lower.
Who is this guy to try and tell the Dean of the Haas Business School what is worthy of a business degree?
Well, he's Lou Dobbs, Executive VP at CNN and he's both rude and ignorant. Immigration is a far too complex topic to address with one liners and anecdotes with emotional appeal. The remainder of the segment was testimony from apologists for the American worker. I'd like to take a moment to remind people that the American worker is the same guy who is the American consumer. Meaning, if stuff is less expensive, then the American worker wins.
Later in the show, he gets Chuck Hegel to attack the Bush administration and tries to get a General to drop dimes and name names of who's responsible for housing reservists in barracks.
I turned off the television to return to you, feeling tired and dejected.