we have is a choice between fewer American manufacturing jobs (automation) or no American manufacturing jobs (outsourcing)
That is simply incorrect. Consider the economic facts of the 20th Century. In each decade, the nation with fastest rising productivity also had the lowest unemployment. There is no obvious correlation between automation and job loss. Sometimes automation gets rid of jobs and sometimes it simply leads to more hiring in that sector, because that sector is profitable.
Adam Smith tied rising wages and high labour demand to growth.
Which becomes problematic if the gravy train stops.
But it would be otherwise in a country where the funds destined for the maintenance of labour were sensibly decaying. Every year the demand for servants and labourers would, in all the different classes of employments, be less than it had been the year before. Many who had been bred in the superior classes, not being able to find employment in their own business, would be glad to seek it in the lowest. The lowest class being not only overstocked with its own workmen, but with the overflowings of all the other classes, the competition for employment would be so great in it, as to reduce the wages of labour to the most miserable and scanty subsistence of the labourer. Many would not be able to find employment even upon these hard terms, but would either starve, or be driven to seek a subsistence either by begging, or by the perpetration perhaps of the greatest enormities. Want, famine, and mortality would immediately prevail in that class, and from thence extend themselves to all the superior classes, till the number of inhabitants in the country was reduced to what could easily be maintained by the revenue and stock which remained in it, and which had escaped either the tyranny or calamity which had destroyed the rest.
That is simply incorrect. Consider the economic facts of the 20th Century. In each decade, the nation with fastest rising productivity also had the lowest unemployment. There is no obvious correlation between automation and job loss. Sometimes automation gets rid of jobs and sometimes it simply leads to more hiring in that sector, because that sector is profitable.