This is really more Dan’s sort of thing, but I couldn’t let it pass without comment.

From yesterday’s NYT magazine interview with Lou Dobbs:

More globally inclined economists insist that the creation of a middle class in poor countries overseas benefits everyone. And aren’t people in India as entitled to jobs as people in America?

Are you willing to sacrifice 600,000 American jobs and employees to create jobs overseas? I love India. I love the Indian people. But the idea that we can sacrifice an American family to create jobs overseas is insensitive beyond belief.

Notice: an American family gets sacrificed, in order to create mere jobs overseas. And even an— that is, one– American family trumps any number of such jobs.

Dobbs calls the economists’ argument “insensitive.” But, as far as I can tell, he’s openly calling for a tradeoff in which any American job is given infinite weight and any Indian job is given zero weight.

If India moves from the ranks of the per-capita desperately poor into the ranks of the per-capita middle-income countries in the next half-century or so, it will be a tremendous aggregate improvement in human well-being. Even apart from the fact that global trade is good for the rich countries too, that offshore outsourcing increases U.S. productivity, and so on, allowing the creation of skilled productive jobs in India is a tremendously good thing.

And the alternative to letting existing U.S. companies do it– moving some of their operations to lower wage-per-productivity markets– is to wait until those companies are uncompetitive and are completely undercut by other firms that make use of the wage-per-productivity differential. It’s not as though the decision by a would-be “Benedict Arnold” company (feh) to stay put instead changes the reality about comparative advantage; it just defers the loss of American jobs for a little while.