A prominent US daily on Friday endorsed views of key economic advisor to the US President George W Bush, N Gregory Mankiw that there is no difference between free trade in goods and free trade in services such as outsourcing of certain jobs to countries like India.
"Is there nothing to be welcomed about workers in poor countries getting decent jobs?" the Washington Post asked.
Outsourcing and India: Complete Coverage
Chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors Prof Mankiw, said the Post, "was brave enough to speak the truth about the shift in service jobs to places such as India."
Bush, the daily noted, sought to limit the political fallout, saying, "We need to act to make sure there are more jobs at home and people are more likely to retain a job."
Mankiw's offence "was to say that the normal rules of trade apply to services as well as manufacturing...it makes sense to buy call-centre services or software programming from India if they are the best on the market," the paper said.
"Not only is Mr Mankiw right, but to argue otherwise is elitist and offensive. It would suggest it is okay for blue-collar workers to lose jobs to foreign competition but not okay for white-collar folk to face the same pressure."
People may feel, said the paper, that the new "offshoring" of service jobs is different because it appears unlimited.
Until now, the loss of US manufacturing jobs attached to trade has been offset by gains in service jobs, which demand some proximity to the customer and have therefore not been tradable. Now that fiber-optic cable links the United States to cheap, educated, English-speaking labour in India and elsewhere, old assumptions about what is tradable have to be rethought.
"The dislocation will create real pain to displaced workers, as Mr Mankiw acknowledged; programmes to retrain them should be expanded. But the US economy will not run out of jobs as a result of some service activities being tradable.
"After all, technology has been eliminating back-office administrative jobs for a decade, yet unemployment sank to record lows during the 1990s. Why believe that the next phase of US cost-cutting will produce a different outcome?"