I don't really understand where you're going with this.  What if my answer is "because government handicaps American business with too much regulation and taxes"?

Also, just a note, your link to Paul's diary looks broken.

I thought that this question was answered decades ago when corporations discovered that profitability increased in correlation with the number of jobs shipped to Mexico. Then China got into the cheap labor act, and it was discovered that there was even more profitability in opening factories in China and closing the Mexican ones.

Business is business. Sorry it is just not about God, country, and apple pie. It is all about which bottom line gets the biggest CEO salary.

Look at the health care debate. While everyone is focused on where we are, think about just how far we pushed the debate. The Public Option remains popular. It is fairly clear it would have been jettisoned early in the debate if we had not pushed back hard.

But in a lot of ways that push back was defensive and after the fact. We never laid to proper groundwork for the debate. We assumed everybody knew, we assumed the policy makers on our side would do it, we assumed that the media would in its ham handed way disseminate some of the underlying problems and concerns. We made those assumptions because indeed everybody knew.

But I cannot help wondering what if, as the stimulus fight was winding down, what if the NetRoots had begun asking the question "Why doesn't health insurance work?". A concerted and sustained effort to premise the debate on its most indefensible point.

Instead the initial framing seemed to be "We have the best health care system in the world". Because of course everybody knew that.

So we started the debate with them not defending the "evil" insurance companies, but us seeming to attack the "nice" doctors and nurses.

So what I am suggesting is that we attempt to frame the coming debates. Because everybody knows "Business creates jobs". But also everybody knows but nobody says "just not in America". We just had the most business friendly Administration and Congress we are likely to see and at best it barely created enough jobs to keep up with population growth.