If capitalism incentivizes offshoring, why are so many capitalists against it?
One thing I’ve never fully understood is how strong defenders of capitalism reconcile that position with opposition to offshoring and globalization. From a market perspective, offshoring makes perfect sense. If a company can lower labor costs, increase profits, improve competitiveness, and raise shareholder value by moving production overseas, then capitalism appears to incentivize exactly that behavior. This isn’t theoretical. We’ve watched manufacturing and industrial jobs leave the US for decades because it was more profitable to produce labor elsewhere at lower cost.
If offshoring is a rational outcome of capitalist incentives within a global market, then on what basis is it being criticized? Is the argument that this is a distortion of capitalism, or is it an intended consequence of firms pursuing profit and efficiency as the system encourages them to?
I’m not even necessarily making a moral argument here. I’m asking how economic nationalism and anti-globalist positions fit alongside strong support for free-market capitalism when the incentives of the system seem to push naturally toward global labor arbitrage.