If America Doesn't Implement the "Buy American" Vision Now, the 21st Century Will Be a Disaster [View all]

[thomhartmann]

A technological arms race is underway right now between China, the United States and Western Europe.

The stakes include military superiority, economic prosperity, and the status of being the political and economic system the world wants to emulate.

China’s most urgent priority is to become independent of American technology, as Fareed Zakaria highlighted on his January 24th CNN show.

At the moment, many products manufactured in China require parts from America, including products sold into the domestic Chinese market and equipment used by the Chinese military. They’re throwing massive resources into becoming technologically independent of the United States.

In this, China is simply doing what George Washington and Alexander Hamilton laid out in 1791, and if we don’t get back to that vision quickly, the 21st-century will, indeed, be the “Chinese Century.”

Technological independence and international trade policy are, it turns out, two sides of the same coin.

In 2016, the single topic that most likely propelled Donald Trump to the White House by grabbing voters in Midwestern swing states was “free trade,” as he repeatedly pointed out the stupidity of promoting offshore manufacturing simply to reduce labor expenses.

He promised to bring manufacturing back to America, and voters in the former manufacturing powerhouses of the Midwest bought his sales pitch. (Sadly, he was so incompetent that his efforts actually made things worse.)

​Trump wasn’t the first president to understand the importance of this, however.

​When General Henry Knox rode up to Mount Vernon in the late summer of 1789 to tell George Washington that Congress had just elected him as the first President of the United States, Washington had two requests for his old friend.

First, he asked Knox to let folks know he’d be delayed by a few days because he wanted to say goodbye to his mother, who was elderly and ailing (turned out, it was the last time he saw her alive).

Second, Washington asked General Knox to ride all the way up to Delaware to visit Daniel Hinsdale, a man who’d been manufacturing black-market American-made fine men’s clothing in defiance of British law for several decades. Knox brought to New York (where the swearing-in took place on what is now Wall Street) a fine American-made suit, which Washington proudly wore.

​Thirteen years earlier, British economist Adam Smith had made worldwide headlines with his bestselling 1776 book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, proposing that the main thing that made a country rich was having independence in manufacturing.

​The process of converting raw materials with little value into finished products was, to Smith’s mind, the best and only practical way a nation could grow wealthy without overseas conquest and plunder.

A tree limb in the forest, for example, had no monetary value, but when labor and the tool of a knife were applied to it and it was turned into an axe-handle, it now had a value that could be passed down through the generations — what Smith called wealth....

Entire article here: https://thomhartmann.medium.com/if-america-doesnt-implement-the-buy-american-vision-now-the-21st-century-will-be-the-chinese-de93d02c9557