The great, sort of, and humbling, definitely, thing about a market economy is that it puts a dollar sign alongside all endeavors and makes them equivalent in that great democracy of the world market where lawyers, guns, and money make sure your vote counts because they're doing the counting.
So writing a program and integrating an application unto a platform is precisely no different than assembling a pre-fab house of components from various countries. There is nothing special about San Francisco Bay Area Labor vs. Bay of Bengal or Tokyo Bay or Bayonne Bay of Bay of Fundy labor, intellectual, manual or anything else. What was it Marx said-- not that one man is as good as another man, but that one man's hour was as good as another man's hour? Time is everything man is nothing. That's all outsourcing really is. And another humbling thing about capital is that absent the proletarian revolution, it will always find a way to reconstitute itself and continue its ragged course-- because there is, in reality, not an absence leading to the reconstituton, but actually defeat. And that's exactly what WWII, pre and post, was. The defeat of that revolution. Henwood is right. Again. Unfortunately. There is no sense bemoaning the intervention of the capitalist state as the saviour of the capitalists' bacon. After all, that's what it's supposed to do. That's what it's always done, whether in the "Golden Age" of laissez faire, like saving the property of the East India Company after the great rebellion of 1857, like supporting the flimflam financing behind the expansion of the US railroads, etc. etc. etc. or in the Imperial Age, with defense contracts, regressive tax structures, subsidies, bailouts, and the ever popular wars to begin more wars. How good is capital? Good enough. Until it's overthrown.
