The Port of Los Angeles

Outsourcing?   We used to call that commerce, the never-ending process of entering new markets or seeking out new trade partners or, back in the really old days, "exploration."   Importing and exporting.   Buying low abroad and selling high at home.   Normal, routine, everyday business.   That's what Obama has been demonizing when he lambastes Romney for "oursourcing."

In this context, Kevin Williamson has a terrific note on The Corner:

I spent this morning at the Port of Los Angeles, one of the world’s great industrial sites. If you believe as I do that the division of labor is the foundation of civilization — something without which we are basically very, very clever monkeys — it is indeed a place of wonder, a head-clutchingly complex operation through which vast amounts of goods and vast sums of wealth travel, bringing Americans that to which we have become accustomed, i.e., all the best that the world has to offer....

It is also a place at which one can see a great number of young men and women making a very good living loading, unloading, trucking, and tracking cargo containers marked MAERSK and CHINA SHIPPING. Watching them at work, I could not help but think of President Obama’s recent anti-globalization rhetoric and Harry Reid’s ridiculously Sinophobic poppycock, and wonder: Why do the Democrats hate Los Angeles? And California? And truck drivers? And crane operators? And the logistics industry?