Buy American craze is crazy!

I wanted to address the strange and escalating movement of “Buy American” that is sweeping the United States.

The first thing to state and categorically is: this is crazy thinking!

Why? It is crazy because the very definition of economy is using resources efficiently. Is it efficient for me to try and grow coconuts here in the High Desert of New Mexico? Is it efficient for us to buy cotton from a New England mill whose cost of production are 10 times that of another nation’s costs? Is it efficient for you to stop buying New Zealand’s Fuji apples, quit your job, plant some apple trees, and become an apple farmer? There are literally millions of examples like this that could be given and I think in the absolute, overwhelming majority of the cases you would be hard-pressed to answer “yes.”

So what does efficiency mean to you personally? If you exclusively “buy American” then you are actually going to end up spending more money on many of your goods and services than if you do not. That means that you have less money to spend on everything else. Because you bought that American manufactured baseball cap that means you have less money to spend somewhere else, say on health insurance. If everyone in the United States were to do this with all of their transactions then we would actually end up collapsing our economy as we move our monies from that which is more efficiently produced to that which is less efficiently produced. It would be like you taking a less direct route to work, thus wasting gas and increasing wear and tear on your car, just because the most direct route to work was down the Japanese-named Miyazaki Street. Think about it, you probably know multiple routes to get to your job; why do you take the route you take most of the time? Because it is the most efficient based on which resource with which you are trying to be efficient. This could be you trying to save gas and wear and tear, or it could be you trying to save time. How often do we try and do anything less efficiently on purpose?

The other reason that this movement is stupid is because most large United States businesses get a huge proportion of their revenues and profits from selling things overseas. If the rest of the world adopts our same strategy then our home-based businesses will collapse and overnight, too!

The fact is that the world’s economy is now inextricably interwoven and will be for the far, far foreseeable future. To “buy American” is to cut off our noses to spite our faces. United we stand, divided we fall. We buy Chinese goods and they buy our debt. Etc. Ad infinitum.

So where did this movement come from? In my opinion, it comes from the deep-seated instinct to pull yourself in tight and to get smaller when you feel fear. When people panic they want to roll up into the fetal position and bury themselves under grandma’s heavy quilts in order to feel safe. The “buy American” thang is just the economic version of this same behavior.

If you are wanting to improve the U.S. economy then stop using debt imprudently.

Jason