The massive elephant sitting in the corner is that it's more expensive to pay for American workers because we have laws and regulations that protect them and ensure they have a decent quality of life. So now it becomes an ethical problem and we all know what to do when we encounter a difficult one of those: shift liability to a corporate entity and chalk up the negative ethical aspects as economics. (
I'm not the one exploiting foreign labor, that's mega corp.)
The greatest feature of globalization is that it distances consumers from the source of the goods they consume. This might be "good" for the consumers in the short term, but it's absolutely not good for their s/economy/quality of life/ in the long run.
What's the effect of instant gratification global capitalism? The American economy now has to compete with the foreign economy. If workers in the foreign country experience a lower quality of life in order to sustain American consumers, then the American worker gets shafted because they have to lower their quality of life to compete. If they won't or can't (because we consider those conditions too inhumane for our own workers) then they have to find new work.
Globalism is the great equalizer.
EDIT: I'm not necessarily saying this is bad for the world (except that human rights and quality of life regress to the mean), and one can also argue that the freed up resources might be put to more.. sophisticated.. uses. I don't know...
I'm responding to the parent: the only way globalizing an economy is good for a strong country (one sitting above the mean) is if you define good in a strictly economic sense like "lowest prices for the consumer" (which is the premise of the parent's argument). It's easy for an economist to do that in isolation because that's the name of the game. A government, however, is not tasked with driving down prices for consumers (that's a market's job) but rather is responsible for roughly maintaining quality of life for its citizens and with protecting its workers, among many other things. Allowing the economy to run unchecked at a global scale essentially equates to selling out the workers. It's not just about who's consumers get the lowest price at the end of the day.