Hmmm.
If I live in Canada and have lots of National pride could I pay more to have one assembled in Canada....
I get folks in the US being all about “made in the USA”, but if you don’t live in the USA does it really matter to the rest of the world ?
I think there are two separate issues, here, and we should probably dis-entangle them.
ISSUE #1: The Type Of Relationship Is Contingent On Behavior, Mutual Benefit, And Compatibility Of Values
If your country stands in a friendly relationship to another country, not merely as a short-term alliance-of-convenience (like that between the Allies and Stalin's Russia during WWII) but in recognition of a deep, long-term compatibility of values (like that between the U.S. and Canada, the U.K., etc.) then you should view
their good as
your good, provided it doesn't impose harsh costs on you in the process.
Specialization Among Friends: Speaking as an American, when Her Majesty's warships occasionally dock in Norfolk, VA, I don't view it as an invasion, but as some friendly visitors who'll convert a few pounds -- yes, I said
pounds, a man can hope -- into dollars and while away some hours complaining about the quality of American beer before they leave.
And I don't
want any American brewers buying and taking over manufacturing my favorite English ales. (Too late.
) For some things, I don't mind buying British even if I pay more for it, if what I'm buying is
their thing and they're good at it. And I wouldn't mind much if they totally
owned the American market for certain products. I don't
want Aston Martins made in Detroit. (Admittedly I couldn't afford one even if they were.) The point is: It's perfectly acceptable, given a genuine-and-deep friendship and respect, to have trade that "takes jobs" from your own citizens, in a small way, provided there's give and take, neither side abuses the privilege, and the end it merely creates a relationship in which each side
specializes in different things.
Critical Industries: However, there are certain things each country needs the ability to manufacture on its own; or, at the very least, industries where one ought not be entirely dependent on
one foreign provider which might, at some future time, turn hostile after a bad election. When things are critical to your survival, you must at least
diversify your sources. I have total confidence in the good will of my Canadian neighbors, but I might be a little concerned if
all our communications gear,
all our electronics,
all our rare-earth mineral resources, and
all our pharmaceuticals were imports from Canada. If life turned into a South Park episode, or a hostile quasi-religious social movement arose in Canada which began smashing the statues of Lee, Lifeson, and Peart (you must have some statues of those guys, right, Canadians? If not, what're you waiting for? Get on it...!) and it gained political power and dominated the universities and looked likely to ideologically conquer the country, I'd be concerned that a
hostile culture, however temporary, held my country's well-being by the throat. I'd want to diversify my pharmaceutical supply to include other countries.
Hostile Action and Incompatible Values: If I found out that British beer was made by slave-labor, or that the Canadians had been shamelessly stealing data and intellectual property from my country's universities and companies for years, or that all of Australia's military planning was focused on defeating my country's military, then the concerns described in the previous paragraph would be magnified. I would need to question whether the friendly relations between countries could still be described as friendly. And if I found that their understanding of human dignity and human rights was less like that of the
real British and Canadians and Australians and French and Brazilians and so on, and more-closely resembled that of Stalinist Russia, I'd have to move the category-of-friendship between us out of the "genuine-and-deep" category and into the "short-term-alliance-of-convenience" category...at best.
ISSUE #2: Local Unemployment and Patriotic Pride
Even in a friendly relationship where the values-systems between two countries
are compatible, it's possible for frictions to arise. If there were genuine competition between, oh, I dunno, Australian and American textile manufacturing industries, and the American ones were all going out-of-business leaving hundreds of thousands of people jobless and destroying towns, and the Australian ones were dominating the market, I might look for areas of give-and-take in the relationship to compensate, and find ways to slow down the destruction of the American industry and towns and livelihoods. This is because friendship needs to be, in some fashion, a win-win relationship, lest frictions cause the overall friendship to decay. Are the Aussies intentionally trying to destroy all my local industries? Or is this merely a consequence of a natural efficiency that geography gives them? Or is it a mix? How I respond will depend on such considerations.
Also, pride and love-of-country is a good, natural, fitting kind of thing, provided it doesn't change character from
love-of-one's-countrymen (and one's country's natural distinctives) into
hatred-of-the-other. I'm okay with a "Buy U.S.A." movement from Americans (why not?) but I
don't want "protectionism" that
punishes other countries trying to compete in the market, if those countries are my friends. My personal consumer choices (partly motivated by my relationship with my neighbors who work in Industry X) is one thing; large-scale government action is another. That should usually be saved for situations where the relationship is less-friendly. And if, frankly, American beer reminds me of the proverbial joke about "having sex in a canoe," then I may not care how many of my neighbors work for Anheuser-Busch!
That's it. Those are the things I wanted to untangle.
Applied to the China thing: It seems to me that there's a difference between "Buy U.S.A." as applied to pharmaceuticals and communications electronics, where the alternative is enriching the Chinese Communist Party, which has been behaving pretty much the way Communist Parties
always behave; and, on the other hand, "Buy U.S.A." where the alternative is Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout, or an Aston Martin, or, best of all, the collected works of G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. (What
is it with these heavily-initialed English authors?)
In the latter case, you're dealing with a deep friendship which ought to remain so, and which should allow for specialization of industry and trade provided that you don't hurt each other in the process and critical supplies remain diversified. In the former case, you're dealing with a shallow friendship, incompatible values, and a history of hostile action. It's not about "Buy U.S.A." in a jingoistic way (or even a sane love-of-country way). It's more about
not selling a hostile dictator the rope he's planning to hang you with.
Hopefully that makes sense.
