There is a very big gap between developing countries cracking down on that kind of practices - which are illegal even by their own regulations - and developing countries being forced to make their products at the same standards and with the same treatment of workers as in the West, thus denying them their cost advantage that gets them all those jobs.

And if you bother to do any reading at all about China or a myriad of other developing countries, you can hardly be blind to the millions upon millions of people who are exponentially more wealthy than they or their parents were twenty years ago, and the rise of the middle class in countries that for a long time had pretty much only the tiny filthy rich elite and the dirt poor everybody else, like in many countries of Africa.

Back in 2000, the United Nations set their "Millennium Development Goals", a list of goals in a number of categories that developing countries were to achieve - reduce extreme poverty by at least half, make education universal, improve health care, and so on. The deadline is 2015; and a good many countries, including many of the biggest like China and India, are quite on track to get there. One shouldn't be overly optimistic or think that the battle is won, but it's ridiculous to deny that on the whole, the situation of the developing world has improved drastically over the past few decades, and looks set to continue improving; there's a reason why we keep getting all those warnings from concerned ecologists about what will happen if all the people in developing countries start approaching the developed countries in their consumption habits.

Nonsense and more nonsense. For the first bit, see above. And for the second, obviously losing your job and not finding a new one will seriously reduce your living standard in the US like anywhere else, but even in the US there is welfare and there are other ways to ensure that the jobless still consume on a certain scale, and hence still profit from the low prices that are permitted by the outsourcing of production, even if obviously the balance is negative in their case. And the unemployed are still few enough that this doesn't come close to making the balance for America as a whole negative.

Lowering production costs substantially will also lower the finished product's cost in any even remotely competitive market, and the free market certainly has increased competition - when American car manufacturing jobs were threatened by the Asian manufacturers offering equally good or better cars at lower prices, the American consumers who didn't happen to work in the auto industry certainly benefited from that. Neither the improvement of Third World living conditions nor the lower prices of goods for Western consumers are matters of debate; you would do well to stop pretending they are, and try building arguments that acknowledge those facts.

And then in that last bit, you're doing it again. Be as Americocentric as you like with regards to defending American jobs, but stop pretending you're doing it for the good of the developing countries. Within reasonable limits, them getting badly-paid jobs at less than perfect working and living conditions is still a far sight better than them not getting any jobs at all, and as you can see all over the world, as developing countries work themselves up out of poverty, wages increase and working conditions improve.