Don’t pretend you also have contributed to America’s high productivity

NYTimes columnist David Brooks wrote an article today titled “the nation of the future”

He argues that Americans remain the hardest working people on the face of the earth and the most productive, and thus should not fear about threat from cheap labor in China and India.

Yes, America indeed has the best technology and the smartest engineers in the world, but don’t pretend that an unskilled laborer in an American textile mile is also 10 times more productive than laborers in China and India, and don’t talk as if you’ve also contributed to the rising productivity. As a matter of fact, as productivity improvement is concentrated in small group of smart people, most of us are more likely to be a liability of the process, that the productivity of most of us is stagnating and our incomes rise thanks to the smartest people's generosity .

Hardworking and smart engineers are not owned by David Brooks or any of their fellow Americans, and they have NO responsibility or duty to share their productivity gains forever with other people who don’t spend time in classrooms, who don’t invent any stuff, and the worst,  who spend more time lobbying for various measures to redistribute (steal) money from hardworking people and drive them away.

With free mobility of capital and technology, it will be more difficult to free-ride the productivity improvement of our smartest friends.  So we should pay due respect to them, as least not pretend that we also contribute to the productive improvement and thus should grab some benefit away from them forcefully through labor regulation, taxation etc.

You can also check out Friedman’s book “The World is Flat”