The return of Made in America

If you feed an educated, socially connected populace a steady diet of war, dirty politics, greedy CEOs, job losses, zero wage growth, ecological mayhem, $3 per gallon gasoline, homeless homeowners, and whining predatory investors, you get about what you’d expect: Some really demoralized, anxious, fed up people. A friend put it this way: “it’s not fun being an American any more.”

We’re not sitting around moaning about it. Americans have their sleeves rolled up. I speak for a lot of you, I think, when I say that I’m resigned to working for the government for several years. Tax me. I know that the war, the bank bail-outs, and the rest of the deficit won’t pay for itself. My American Dream is a simple one: To see this place cleaned up. Everywhere I turn I find that same brand of Yankee resolve, and nobody’s asking who’s voting for whom. Fun? Maybe not, but I am proud, and it’s the first time in ten years that I’ve spoken to my neighbors.

There is a real push to do something now, and some around me have decided that they’re overdue for some fiscal self-discipline. If spending’s going to be tight, why delay the discomfort? Get used to austerity now, while you have the choice, so that it won’t be such a harsh adjustment later. You can walk through Wal-Mart and feel money retreating into people’s wallets. Consumer spending is down, and shouldn’t it be? Isn’t selfish consumerism, spending, and borrowing for stuff we don’t need, one of the main reasons that America, and the Earth, are in the mess they’re in? With so much serious work to do, this is a stupid time to go shopping. And yet that’s what our government wants us to do. America is paying citizens $600 apiece to “spend our way out of the recession.” In the midst of a serious and sober national dialog to which Washington has contributed too little, when the government finally does speak, it cracks open the door, shouts “PlayStations for everybody!” and ducks back inside.

I’ve been so serious-minded, so deeply analytical of this country’s plight and its path out, that the stimulus initially struck me as an affront. Ours is a people on the verge of righteous revolt. Are we so stupid as to be mollified by an election-year payoff? No. I see, very clearly, what we must do with this money. We must spend it. If you look in that direction and squint, you can almost see Herbert Hoover in the White House. Under circumstances very similar to today’s, with a threadbare dollar, mountains of bad debt, and a demoralized, risk-averse, cash hoarding populace, Mr. Hoover faced a choice: Stimulate the economy, liquidate the economy, or let banks, businesses, and the open market sort it out. Hoover chose the third option. Our administration has chosen stimulus. We can’t know how that will pan out, but I’m sure not on Hoover’s bus.

This is odd advice coming from an IT columnist, I realize. And I’m sure it’s apparent that I, perhaps like you, can’t quite get my thoughts on the economy straight — there are so many angles here, and so many third rails to avoid. But I have to say with complete candor that I think America is going to come out all right. On the one hand, the global economy appears to be handing us our hat; it has clearly gone on without us. But on the other hand, we have a world full of people with rapidly rising living standards. The very places we looked to for cheap labor are themselves facing the consequences of success: Wage pressure, housing shortages, infrastructure inadequacies, and competition for materials and transport. Everywhere in the world, the cost of land, labor, and materials are skyrocketing. It can’t keep up.

Here in the U.S., land and labor are cheap. We mine and grow our own materials, we have enormous unused industrial capacity, regulation is lax, crime rates are low, and the political climate is stable. We can ship anywhere. There is no smarter place in the world to build a factory now, and because of the weak, or as I say, welcoming Dollar, it’s hard for any global competitor to beat the U.S. price on anything. U.S. businesses will start pulling manufacturing back into the States as well, because the labor and transport cost savings won’t justify shipping it to Asia much longer.

Why spend money now? Initially, what goes around comes around. In the long run, you want American consumerism to set a good example, because within a few years, America will return to its status as the world’s leading source of supply. That’s a sustainable future, and it’s worth a little sacrifice.