Economic growth is all about dependence. The higher your standard of living the more interdependent relationships you create. If you make a high salary, you are probably very specialized in your skills. Specialization creates a lot of wealth, but it means that you depend more and more on others for everything else that you have. Here is Adam Smith's famous story about pin manufacturing in the Wealth of nations.

To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of a pin−maker: a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade, nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations ; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another ; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper ; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty−eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty−eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth, part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.

I also think it is helpful to look at what would happen is there was not trade. Think of how you would live if you had to provide everything for yourself. In other word, how would your life be if you did not depend on others?

Try to imagine your life with no trade (including outsourcing). In other words, anything you pay for, you now have to do for yourself. What would your clothes be like? What kind of food would you eat? Do you think you would have much of a house? You can forget about electricity or toilets. Your only running water would be in a stream. If you want heat, start rubbing those sticks together.

Trade creates wealth. That includes trade in services (outsourcing). Those who want to throw up barriers, including barriers to outsourcing, need to realize that while they may think that a particular barrier benefits them personally, it means that the world as a whole is worse off. Since the world is not likely to restrict its trade barriers to those that benefit them personally, they may want to think again before advocating barriers to free trade. Trade is what separates us form a life in which we are all cold, naked and hungry.

http://markbarnes.us/blog%201-29-05.htm