There are a lot of anti-unionists and Libertarian minded programmers in the US.

What he’s doing with Twitter and all his culture war nonsense is beneath him. Or at least it’s beneath the character he created that people compared to Tony Stark.

People who want to work on spaceships do not want to go help him stan for a guy called "catturd2."

The evidence does not show the American worker being better off after these policies you support were enacted and have had decades to run. Free trade is great for shareholders and some consumer cohorts who get excess utility, but terrible for workers. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp147/

https://www.epi.org/publication/botched-policy-responses-to-...

https://www.epi.org/press/globalization-lowered-wages-americ...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/09/459087477...

You're almost certainly correct in the sense that the people of the entire system will be better off, but your own domestic market could suffer at the gain of the other market where the business is now being outsourced to.

A good example of this might be tech in the EU. The EU basically has no major tech companies because we "import" all our tech services the US (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc). It's great for us in the sense that we didn't have to pay anyone to build amazing online services like Facebook, Google, etc – it's just free stuff we get here from the US. But who benefits the most from this arrangement, is the US or the EU? I'd argue that the EU allowing the US to provide all of our major tech services has been great for US growth, but it's stagnated the EU economy in recent years as we've had no real reason to build 21st century companies here. The free stuff we get from the US actually comes at a cost for us even if overall the economy as a whole (EU + US) is better off for it.

Similarly, imagine an extreme scenario where US companies outsource all work to low-cost labour countries (I know this is impossible, but assume the US is 100% service sector jobs which could be outsourced). Would this hypothetical scenario be good for the US economy? It might be good for companies registered in the US because now they can provide their services to markets they serve for a fraction of the cost, and it would be great for those low-cost labour countries getting all this foreign work, but it would be awful for the actual US economy that's allowing this to happen in the pursuit of efficient markets.

So yeah, you might be growing the whole pie at a faster rate, but it's possible mass outsourcing doesn't help grow your share of the pie. And like with manufacturing, you also need to consider how you'll lose technical competency within your domestic market over time if you outsource too much, and this will likely lead to the country you out sourced to eventually out competing you in your own industries. We see this today in China.

If you want to cripple tech innovation in the US, outsource all your software engineers so there's no one in the US with the skills or resources to start the next Google or Facebook.

The theory only says that all the people globally will be better off. It does not say anything about citizens of a specific country that is applying protectionism. They may be better off for it, they may be worse - it depends on the particulars and, as most economic interventions, can only really be judged post-factum.

Short and mid term matters a lot to people.

Eh, maybe not. It depends on the demand and availability of skill/labor. If you have a high percentage of low skill labor and you can outsource low skill labor to cheaper markets, then what are the current low skill citizens going to do? Surely the rust belt is not better off now than when coal and steel (and other manufacturing) were still a domestic thing. Maybe other areas of the county faired better, but with median wages dropping over the past 50 years, it doesn't seem like a strong case.

Seems like retail, warehouses, and other unskilled labor are the main options. Even something like teaching would require a certification.

There are of course lots of bad coders in India, but there are also many really good ones. And whereas in the past they had to emigrate to US or Europe to fully make use of their talents, nowadays some(many?) choose to remain in India and work remotely. It's silly to dismiss and underestimate their skills.

As far your experience with developers that follow the specs literally, in an almost maliciously compliant way, that might be learned behavior from working on projects where the tasks are spec-ed and estimated and any attempts at going above and beyond ultimately result in late delivery and punishment, so developers quickly learn to only do the bare minimum of what is described. Granted your examples are extreme and pathological, so maybe you just had the misfortune of working with really bad people.

Additionally, unless you pick the developers yourself, you're at the mercy of the agencies who assemble those offshore teams, and often the economics are such that it doesn't incentivize them to hire the best people available. From my experience, many good developers find work on their own, outside of an agency, contracting directly with the remote company.