Blue-collar men: Criminal underclass or wasted resource?

This is my take on the whole outsourcing of blue collar work and what it's doing to America.

OK, so you take a guy's job away, and ship it to China or something. This guy has a relatively low IQ, and can't or won't go to college and get a degree. What is he gonna do? I've applied for jobs with less than a college education myself, and it's not easy to get employed. And the stuff you can reasonably expect to get employed in is on the level of 7-11 or Arby's. Making $9 or $10 an hour, maybe $12 an hour, tops. If I was a blue-collar guy I'd say fuck this, and turn to a life of crime.

You have a situation where guys aimlessly drift through life, easily captivated by extremism (gangs, terrorism, etc.) and not really contributing to society. These guys wax and wane, going into prison, and then coming right back out and doing the same things they did before. So what you see is someone being a cost to society either as a menace, or a prisoner, instead of producing widgets or doing labor to support society and genuinely be a part of it.

The current solution to this problem seems to be the band-aid approach of giving these guys draconian prison sentences. That way they stay in prison, instead of being a menace. But these guys are still a net drain on society, instead of being productive.

Lots of people from the conservative side will say that these people are animals and really need to be locked up. Are they really sure about that? I'm sure a good percentage are animals that need to be behind bars no matter what, but every single last one of them? It sounds a little hyperbolic to me. And if you take this at face value, and assume that they're all animals, then why is society creating so many animals?

I believe that if gainful employment, not jack-in-the-box employment, is reasonably attainable to someone without a college degree, then a lot of the social problems you see in ghettoes and among the poor underclass will disappear. These people turn to crime because they see no way out, and they're often correct. What's a guy who's not smart enough for college to do? People have TV, they see what middle class lifestyle is about. They don't want to live in slummy conditions making $10 an hour for the rest of their life.

I think the people who are outsourcing the country need to be dropped into a ghetto by helicopter and forced to live there while we rebuild the industrial economy. Stop assuming everyone is college ready and give these people a genuine way out of their problems.