According to the act being played out now in presidential politics, it's shaping up that job "outsourcing" and medicine are going to be huge issues. Proper solutions to these problems are tremendously vital to the interests of college students and our generation.

The strategies being advocated, however, will not "make America strong," as George W. Bush likes to say, nor will they fulfill the repetitive Democratic goal of eliminating special interests in Washington, D. C.

What they will do, however, is kill the true foundations of what America is based upon and leave a disastrous mess for our generation. We have to ask ourselves if we are willing to bear the costs. Are we prepared for personal responsibility and the role of the individual to be relegated to second-class status, in the name of what some in power like to allude to as the common good?

The big "wedge issue" shaping up for the election run is the "outsourcing" of American jobs, or what some are calling the "hollowing out" of the American economy. The argument goes that we must protect American jobs from unfair foreign competition because, well, it's just not fair that American workers should have any competition.

Being that the U.S. economy operates in a free-market competitive environment, I guess it's very easy to place blame on large multinationals that couldn't care less about their workers.

Rather than attacking the true root of the problem -- that the American educational system needs to be upgraded to produce more competent workers -- we hear that everyone has a right to a job and that we must prevent the "offshoring" of well-paying jobs. Various measures -- from eliminating free trade pacts to punishing corporations wishing to increase returns to shareholders -- may make us more "equal" but will harm the productive people of our country.

Rather than closing up and weeping at our misfortune, we should follow former General Electric CEO Jack Welch's advice to "innovate or die." If you think your job is vulnerable to foreign competition, you only really have to fear that you are being paid too much for what your skills are really worth, or that maybe your skills aren't relevant to the advanced modern economy. I know it seems unpatriotic that one should advocate freer trade when American jobs are being lost in competition to cheaper foreign labor.

However, we will be better off in the long run if our workers realize that they must adapt to an evolving landscape of the labor market by upgrading their skills. I also know that I do not wish to pay an extra amount for a pair of pants just because it will make the common proletarian feel complacent. We should all take advantage of our time here at Penn State to ensure that we prepare ourselves for the changing labor environment.

Another controversial issue is that of drug "reimportation" from Canada and the dramatic expansion of Medicare. Without needlessly boring you, it essentially boils down to two arguments: the right of access to modern medicine against the intellectual property of multinational pharmaceutical companies. It's "we can't let people suffer and live in pain" versus "we spent 10 to 15 years and $800 million to research and develop this product, so we can charge whatever we want."

It's popularly portrayed these days as being nobler if one screams about pharmaceutical industry ties with the Bush administration than about the theft of ideas from productive companies. This approach is wrong. No one should argue that all Americans don't have the right to basic healthcare in the form of doctor visits and generic prescriptions.

But, it is grossly perverse to the rights of the scientist, venture capitalist and even the janitor of the pharmaceutical company that they are coerced to deliver their innovations for less than what their efforts are worth. Ask your friends here studying biology, chemistry or a similar field if they think they should be paid less than their real value. By not allowing pharmaceutical companies the chance to recover the research costs of their risks, we are essentially killing the future development of new drugs.

If you feel that we need to preserve the status quo on social security, enhance medical coverage and cancel free trade pacts, the line starts over there for volunteers to pay a much larger share of our future income in taxes. Bush's new $540 billion Medicare handout program will lead to this.

The common thread in these issues is that it shapes up as the productive individual and business against the dependent mass. Before we assume that it is our "right" to demand that we have a job, or that the rest of society must subsidize our living expenses, we should consider what it takes to produce opportunities in the first place.

Being a student at a university as large as Penn State should help us learn that we shouldn't insist that people hold our hands and provide us with whatever we want.