I’m not especially bothered by offshoring in itself — jobs have been moving from more-advanced to less-advanced economies for centuries as a normal part of development. But Norm Matloff points to stories from Sri Lanka and Armenia that our tax dollars are being used by USAID to train foreigners to take software jobs from our own workers. I’m skeptical of foreign aid in general, but at least when we give some banana republic money for weapons, they use it to buy our stuff. Here we’re using our money to artificially generate competition for our own workers and firms. I’m a fan of Armenia, as you can imagine, and I hope it succeeds in establishing itself as a “center for low-cost IT and engineering work outsourced from the U.S. and other Western countries” — but they need to do that on their own without my tax money subsidizing their efforts.