Let us consider the consequences of this system [of unlimited freedom of capital]. The multiplication of the paths of exchange will soon lead to its logical conclusion, and we will only see on the market those goods produced by the most miserable of peoples. The Chinese will become the world’s best workers because they only require that their animal needs be met. Later, the worker, the engineer, the salesman, and the banker himself will be purchased on the open market. Then the banker of London, Paris, or Vienna, having made himself rich by putting his capital to work in China, will in turn face an unequal struggle against the Chinese usurer, who will not give himself the luxuries of a princely palace, teams of horses, parties, and the life of the rich. An irremediable decline awaits the economic order of the civilization of the West at the end of this path of freedom of labor, a path down which it is led by the teaching of the philosophers, the science of the economists, and the power of the capitalists. ~ Rene de La Tour du Pin, The Corporate Regime

La Tour du Pin observed the economic problems that now beset Western countries over a century ago, and in his prophecy we can see the offshoring of our computer engineering and other technical jobs and the de-industrialisation of developed nations, particularly that of the United States. The logic of such a system, even when it labours under the distortions of its state capitalist framework, is to denude developed nations of all their advanced and creative industries. In a very specific way, this process is highly rational in terms of lowering costs and improving efficiency, but in terms of national self-interest at some point such a process becomes self-defeating.