Locobot

Political chaos is an historical constant. There will always be strife over who leads and how. Many economic laws exist outside of anyone's ability to accept or reject them, acceptance is compulsory. Your history of outsourcing is enlightening but omits the impetus behind the current wave: the disembodiment of the means of production. Industry has attained global mobility through technology (e.g. steel manufacture via electric arc furnace rather than larger scale blast furnace production). Many companies' product and means of production are now completely ethereal (e.g. computer programming). Political regulation of industry in this case is largely futile or impossible, how does a government assign value to and tax information streaming across fiber optic networks?

How does one reject globalism and outsourcing while still keeping a nation's industry competitive on a global scale? Isolationism is largely impossible due to communications technology. Economic protectionism, in case you didn't know, isn't exactly en vogue with the business community. Corporate lobbyists are powerful enough to make the business world's view also the government's view. The dictum has been that democratization and wanton capitalism will raise the sunken economies of America's trading partners. In reality though the impoverished nations we outsource to will, in time, pull down the American economy.