I continue here to offer some free instruction in economics to a second cousin of mine.
Prentiss:
I want to say more, in addition to this earlier reply, in response to this Facebook comment of yours:
I will gladly pay more for prescription drugs that are made in the US, not China. Actually, I will happily pay more for jeans, auto parts and most of the other stuff that in my lifetime was produced domestically. I would happily pay more to see all the dead towns in America come to life again, towns who died when its industry was “GLOBALIZED”. I will pay more to buy products from anywhere the leadership, unlike the CCP isn’t devoted to destroying America and the West.
If you pay more for American-made jeans and auto parts, what will you pay less for? How do you know that the extra dollars that you pay for a pair of American-made jeans will not cause you to pay less for, say, an American-served restaurant meal or American-grown oranges? If that’s the result, you might save a job for an American in a textile mill, but you’ll thereby destroy a job for a worker in an American restaurant-supply company or on an American orange grove. Do you think that the American textile worker is more entitled to keep his or her current job than is either of these other American workers?
You’ll respond that you’ll ensure that the items on which you reduce your spending are imports. Achieving this outcome is much harder than you likely suppose, but even if you successfully do so, your choosing to pay more for American-made products simply because they’re American-made will destroy other American jobs no less surely than if you reduce your spending on American restaurant meals and oranges.
Foreigners don’t sell us things because they want to accumulate monochrome portraits of dead American statesmen. They sell us things for the same reason that we sell us things: we want to purchase other things in return. If you spend fewer dollars on, say, Malaysian-made jeans or on Canadian-made auto parts, Malaysians and Canadians will have fewer U.S. dollars. They will then buy fewer American exports and invest less in the U.S. Because foreigners’ purchases of American exports, and foreigners’ investments in the U.S., create American jobs, your choosing to spend more on American-made products will indeed save some American jobs but only by destroying other American jobs.
Can you justify saving the job of the textile worker in South Carolina given that doing so destroys the job of the machine-tool worker in Alabama?
You are and ought to be free to spend your money in whatever peaceful ways you choose, and for whatever reasons you find compelling. (This sentiment, note, is rejected by Pres. Trump and other protectionists.) But this freedom doesn’t change economic reality: Spending more dollars to save jobs in American industries A, B, and C will inevitably destroy particular jobs in American industries X, Y, and Z. The fact that the latter are invisible to economically untrained eyes does not make them less real.
In a third email I’ll answer your point about China.
Sincerely,
Don
