(Coming soon: In another article from 1933, the Nation's Moscow correspondent critiques Stalin's economic policies.)
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America has become a "service related" industial nation and so it would be difficult to buy American completely. I do agree that when possible, we should buy American unless you are financially unable to afford American made goods and services. But we should definitely boycott nations who denigrate our nation and it's leaders such as France, Germany, Russia, China, and North Korea. We of course are unable to boycott OIL from the middle east because if we bought only American produced oil and oil products, we would have to give up using anything that requires oil or oil products because most of them would have been produced using foreign oil to make them. Most if not all electronic gadget housings are made from petroleum products.
I like Milton Friedman's analysis of the balance of trade. We send little pieces of paper with cute pictures of Ben Franklin to Japan and they send us luxury automobiles. And this is supposed to impoverish our country?
It's funny how some bad economic ideas keep coming back. In 1937 or so some in the UAW wanted to demolish assembly lines to increase the number of workers it would take to make a car. In 1982 the Office of Technology Assessment darkly warned about looming massive unemployment from industrial robots.
But nothing has been as persistent as the demands for protection from foreign competitors. And it is as foolish today as it was in the eighteenth century. People always want to overlook the fact that the money saved on a 'cheap' import lets you buy other things that employs other people. We'd be a more prosperous country if the 2/3 of the money we spent on domestic sugar and the people who produce it went to improve the lot of poor foreigners, while we used the savings for other things and put our talented people to work making things more valuable than sugar.