Renze said:
Its your right to shop biased
I must admit i do the same, and agree that we (the world) can no longer avoid Chinese goods. But lets not forget that many parts from cars we buy, are already made in Asia. The "buying 100% american goods" is a misconception: Anno 2008 its nearly impossible.
And for us, the Dutch, its the same thing: Our famous Philips bulb lights are outsourced to Asia, as well as the plasma screens. Philips just had to do something to stay competitive against the Jap and Korean brands.
Definitely. And you have a one-up on the Americans from that perspective. The perspective that buying 'in-country' Holland would have been impossible from day 1. So you never had the expectation. Whereas in America it was more of a closed system previously such that everything COULD be produced and consumed here. It was never seen as a particularly good thing to do, or as part of a consumption bias. It was just seen as the way we got to live our lives.
I have close friends who work at the Aerospace company that was awarded the TANKER $100 billion contract, which was subsequently protested - and led to highly vocal public comment. The competition is between Boeing and Northrop Grumman. Boeing's solution was one of their planes. Northrop Grumman's solution was based on a plane from EADS, France.
Turns out that while Northrop Grumman's solution is 65% foreign-sourced, Boeing's solution is 50% foreign-sourced. And both solutions end up bringing thousands of jobs to the States. Etc.
After talking this over with my buddy for long long periods of time, my final take is that all us Americans could do ourselves a huge favor by directly asking the question: do we want this globalization stuff, or not? Our terrific democracy is definitely capable of bringing that question to the table. It would be easy to give America's armed services the directive that all product be designed, fabricated and assembled onshore. Or even some measured-compromise type of arrangement, such as giving extremely high award points based on the relative amount of onshore build.
Now the problem with this hit-it-direct approach is that Americans are conflicted themselves. The same people who want to buy onshore are the people who shop at Walmart. And in addition to this fundamental conflict, Americans have just become lazy as result of all this cheap product. Meaning that we basically don't know how to engineer this stuff any more, and we basically don't want to build it with our own hands.
Some people would argue that this last problem will fix itself. We just go ahead and pay a bunch of money to have our stuff engineered, then built. Then all those objects are sold at high price, to be consumed by people who make all those big wages.
It's just so unreasonable to think that Americans would ever upend its culture that much. To conceive that free markets as we know them would be constrained only to American production. That American business itself would give up access to foreign customers, assuming that foreign countries would allow American imports since the American trade border is closed.
At the end of this complicated story it's still clear to me that we now live in one planet and need to figure out the new rules, or decide to slug it out as most of history before.