Who is the real "outsourcer-in-chief?"

Mr Obama says: Mitt Romney is the "outsourcer-in-chief," meaning thereby that Mr Romney is responsible for the outsourcing of American jobs overseas.

Mr Romney should reply to Mr Obama by explaining to him some basic facts about the modern global economy.

American jobs are outsourced overseas because products for the American market can be produced by overseas labor at the same or better level of quality or for the same or lower price than they can be produced by American labor.

Why are American workers not more competitive? One of the main reasons is because of the inefficiencies and rigidities introduced into American labor markets by unions.

Every American industry that has a highly unionized workforce eventually founders. What has been the most pernicious influence in the automobile industry over the last several decades? The unions. Why has the American steel industry shrunk to a shadow of its former size? The unions. What is bankrupting state and municipal governments? The extravagant salaries, pensions, and benefits of workers in government unions.

Aside 1: (According to WSJ, the annual cost of pay and benefits for a member of the United Steel Workers union averages $170,855 per year: "Charles Bradford, an analyst with Bradford Research Inc. said the larger integrated mills that make steel by melting raw materials, including iron ore and coal, need to cut production costs "or they just won't be able to compete," he says.)

Aside 2: (On GPS this week, Fareed Zakaria, hardly a hard-hearted conservative, described the situation with public service employee unions as follows: "At its heart, the [municipal] bankruptcies you keep hearing about these days aren’t about taxes being too low or spending on city services being too high – they're about pensions. California's pension-related costs rose 20-fold in the decade since 1999. This frightening trend is true almost everywhere in America. And it’s simply not sustainable. A recent Pew research survey found that the gap between state assets and their obligations for public sector retirement benefits is $1.38 trillion. It rose by 9 percent in 2010 alone – and it will likely keep rising until these obligations are renegotiated. The truth is America is sacrificing its future to pay for its past. To keep up with burgeoning pensions, states and cities are slashing services. It's also feeding into the unemployment problem. State and local governments have 445,000 fewer workers today than in 2007. For decades now, local governments have doled out patronage by increasing pension benefits – these costs impact the budget years later, when the officials who gave the benefits are safely retired themselves. We're now having to reckon with those choices. I'm not saying bankruptcies are a good thing. But they are a mechanism that allows us to admit an emergency and renegotiate the deals that are, well, bankrupting the country." In other words, one of the main factors contributing to unemployment in America is the fact that pensions and benefits for public workers are too rich.)

And yet, instead of attempting to break the stranglehold the unions have on American businesses and government, President Obama lines his pockets with union contributions and does everything in his power to strengthen them and prop up union pay and benefits.

He hands over to the United Auto Workers union tens of billions of dollars in bailouts, all paid for by American taxpayers. And then he has the audacity to claim that these bailouts were a great success. Yes, they were a great success for the workers of the UAW, who gave up nothing, but they were a disaster for American taxpayers in general, who footed the entire bill.

State and municipal governments have been cutting government jobs like crazy for the last several years because they can't afford to pay their current employees while at the same time funding the extravagant benefit and pension packages given to retired union workers. What does this President have to say about this? Instead of working for the reform of government unions (as Republican governors Chris Christie of New Jersey, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, and Mitch Daniels of Indiana have), the President says the "private sector is doing fine; we need to send more money to state and local governments to hire more government union workers."

Why is the economy in Silicon Valley booming these days? Could it be that for all intents and purposes unions do not exist there, management and workers are not adversaries, and instead their interests are aligned through the distribution of stock options?

So, instead of insisting that American workers man up and improve their competitiveness in either quality or cost, Mr Obama would rather spoil and coddle them. His attitude can best be summed up in the whine: "American businesses have an obligation to support American workers, even when it isn't the best financial choice. Profits and efficiency should not trump generosity. After all, we are all in this together."

This is, simply put, sheer madness. In a fast-paced, quickly changing global marketplace, unless businesses focus laser-like on profits and efficiency, they rapidly perish, and all jobs are lost.

In all my years in Silicon Valley, I have never heard anyone say: "I have an American software engineer in Palo Alto who is producing low-quality software, for which I am paying him a high salary. There is an Indian software engineer in Bangalore (or a Czech in Prague, or an Irishman in Dublin) who is just as well educated, writes software of better quality, and is willing to work for less. Nevertheless, I'll keep my American software engineer instead of hiring the Indian (Czech, Irishman) because we Americans are all in this together and I have an obligation to be generous to my fellow American." If American businesses adopted this attitude, they would all rapidly go belly up. Every person who works in the business world understands this intuitively. But, our President, whose only prior experience is as a community organizer and college professor, cannot seem to grasp this point. He would rather spoil and coddle American workers, doing everything he can to preserve their "purchasing power." But, by propping up union salaries, Mr Obama only makes American labor too expensive relative to the cost of labor elsewhere in the global marketplace and thereby actually hastens the flight of jobs overseas.

So, let's be clear about the reason why so many American jobs are being outsourced overseas these days. American labor cannot compete because it is being made more expensive and less productive by the frictions and bloat introduced into labor markets by unions. The "enabler-in-chief" of these unions is Mr Obama, aided and abetted by the entire Democratic Party, bankrolled by the unions themselves. So, if anyone is responsible for the loss of American jobs overseas, it is Mr Obama and the Democrats, not Mr Romney.