The adjunct to that theory is that as the United States sheds those jobs tied to producing goods now made overseas, it will move on to new, better-paying jobs in emerging industries. In aggregate, the nation benefits because it is spending less for goods and services, thus providing more money for investment or for the pockets of American consumers.

That theory relies on a containership's worth of tenuous propositions -- that companies have profits to show for outsourcing, that those profits will be transferred to the general public and that the American economy will continue to generate good-paying next-generation jobs to replace those that have been lost.

But reality, as it has a wont to do, may not cooperate so neatly. Those profits may be vaporous at best because even as companies are cutting costs, they're also under tremendous pressure from their customers to cut prices.

As for consumers, none of them live in Aggregate World. They live in a world in which they may have lost a good-paying job that they've replaced with one that doesn't pay as well; cheaper prices may produce at best only a wash in their standard.

We'll get to that argument about generating new jobs in a moment.

But of course no presidential candidate wants to go around telling the voters they're a bunch of greedheads. And how greedy are they, really? Those greedy consumers are simply doing the rational thing from the standpoint of budgetary self-preservation -- just as the executives are trying to preserve their companies by cutting costs through outsourcing.

That's where those next-generation replacement jobs are going to come from. The problem is that it's not just jobs that are going overseas -- it's know-how and R & D capacity and technologies and expertise and customer feedback, all the elements from which innovation and improvement spring.

It's one thing to outsource mowing the grass because you've got more important things to worry about. It's quite another to outsource customer relations and design and manufacturing and the other crucial components of whatever product you make or service you provide.

One of the raging fallacies behind the "it's all just free trade" arguments is that the rest of the world will be content to take what falls off our economic table. They're not going to be making cheap plastic toys and staffing call centers. BusinessWeek has a cover story this week on the emergence of India as a power in software. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that India is now a player in automotive exports. Business Week had an item in January that India is also becoming a major center for pharmaceutical research sponsored by drug companies. And ask the average Boeing worker if China represents a threat to get into commercial aerospace on its own, thanks to the technology exported there over the years.

Technology gap? What technology gap?

In fact it's going to require a lot of little things from trade and tax policy to R & D investment and education, and a whole lot of stuff you can't legislate -- more patience and long-term thinking on the part of executives, investors and consumers, for starters.

Not as simple as it looks -- no matter from which side you're looking at it.

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