Does the country of origin of the innumerable things flying off the shelves of the Wal-marts and Home Depots matter? Yes, if the inquiring mind is allowed to rise above society’s multicultural mantra that no country or culture is better than another. In addition, if your neighbor sells a local product and where you live has a sense of community, that may factor into the question as well.
Unsurprising to any purchaser is the “Made in China” label and that the country of China is the producer of much of America’s goods on U.S. retailer shelves. By this interrelationship the much debated question arises: What’s wrong with China producing our goods and services? Two huge problems: One, that China is a Communist nation, the kind of political system that Democratic countries are fundamentally opposed to; and two, another country producing all our needs sets up a crippling dependency on others and saps our country’s self sufficiency.
If a country employs a political or cultural system like Communism to enslave and humiliate their own people, you should ask yourself if you want to be an integral part of that system. The tiny tag hidden away that says “Made in China” certainly doesn’t seem that obtrusive. After all, the tag makes up a tiny fraction of the overall product.
But is this the extent of your purchasing intelligence? So that you can pull on that deliciously soft and satisfyingly cheap pair of cotton underwear, all other concerns become irrelevant? What about the underage girl working excessively and inhumanely for an unsustainable wage within the confines and abusive oversight of a corrupt government, or worse?
The offending list of manufacturing countries shoveling stuff on the U.S. begins with China’s communist boot but continues on in a stream of villainy and oppression: Pakistan, India, Mexico, Egypt, and Vietnam, to name a few. Pakistan? There’s an honorable country, much like the other Middle Eastern countries where the people are in a confused state of agitated religious excitement, where women are frequently raped or murdered by “honor-killings”, where fanatic terrorists feel at home, and where life is generally a downtrodden mixture of fear and depravity that is devoid of human reasonableness.
What if these countries cleaned up their affairs? Wouldn’t it be acceptable then to get all our stuff we need from them? Or better yet, why don’t we buy our products from countries like Canada or the Finnish countries where human freedom is acknowledged and workers are more valued? The answer is simple: It is fine to import and rely good-naturedly on these ‘friendly’ countries for some goods and services, but depending on other countries for practically all our needs sets up a crippling dependency that robs the U.S. of its independence and self-direction.
Such a wrongly balanced relationship can only encourage ill will, where one country loses to another in a subservient manner. Americans lose because their unprincipled appetite for material things are enormously appeased by Chinese trinkets, and China loses because they lower themselves in satisfying this American fault. Here we have our present state of affairs: We are distrustful of China, and China likewise towards us; yet, we unhinge our jaws to accommodate the loads of junk China shovels down our throats… and we revel in it. Truly, a sick and distorted relationship.
At a self-sufficient level, the ability to stand up on one’s own two feet is crucial. This progression towards independence is equally as important within the family structure all the way up to a country’s structure. This ability to “handle one’s own affairs” is necessary in order for you or your family or your country to function independently. Stripping our ability to provide for ourselves on any of these levels takes away this self-directive ability. As a result of not correctly knowing ourselves where to go or what to do, we can only be led astray or place our hope in others who might help lead us. But here is the quandary: If we don’t know ourselves the proper way to do things, how can we possibly know if someone else is truly helping us?
The realization that some countries and cultures are better than others should guide people’s purchasing decisions and government policy. For example, the inquiring mind would naturally investigate the aforementioned countries and decide if those place are indeed good places to be supported. At the close of every consumer transaction the final purchaser of the products, you, are the demand that creates the market forces to produce the products you crave.
This kind of guiding principle should be utilized too on the governmental level where they can be written into law and enforced more universally, so that doing business with offensive countries would be phased out or halted completely. This would help to revive U.S. product manufacturing, and with manufacturers taking pride in their products and their quality the practice of buying local would be commonplace.
Sadly, the reality in the U.S. is that the unhinged unprincipled jaws of Americans, the megalithic material production of China, and the unfit governments presiding over all this nonsense march to the tune of the same drummer: Too much is never enough. Reduce, reuse, and recycle (the three R’s) was just a catch phrase of the 1970’s to be discarded when the winds of cultural relativism shifted.
“Living Ever Larger: How Wretched Excess Became a Way of Life in Southern California” by Patrick J. Kiger
