[Vision2020] Food/gas prices

[Paul Rumelhart]

Ellen Roskovich wrote:
> *"Made in China" does not automatically make a product inferior.  Go 
> to Macy's instead of Wal-mart and pay top dollar for your coat, shoes, 
> housewares, whatever.  At least when Japan was flooding our market 
> with inexpensive trinkets, we still had a HUGE percentage of goods 
> "Made in the USA" and we knew that there were jobs within our shores.  
> We could pretty much provide everything we needed.*
> ** 
> *I just wonder what will the future hold.  Perhaps when it becomes too 
> expensive to manufacture and ship goods to the USA, we will see 
> Chinese businessmen buying our closed factories, refurbishing them and 
> hiring us.  This is an interesting world we live in.*
> ** 
> *Ellen A. Roskovich*

I think with the high price of gasoline, "distance to ship" will become 
a much more important metric in the future.  This has it's downsides, 
but it might help promote more "made in the USA" products instead of 
"assembled in the USA" or "folded neatly in the USA" (as Jon Stewart 
suggested one time).  Sure, the Chinese or whichever other foreign 
boogeymen you want to specify may buy up our factories, but they will 
not be competitive if they have to ship all their materials over.  So 
they will buy locally, which will still help us (unless the evil 
Liechtenstein-ians buy all our mines and processing plants).  In any 
case, we will get some tax revenue from them.

In my pollyanna view of the world, it might also help quality to become 
more important, rather than just price - as the lead paint in toys scare 
has shown us.  If it costs more to ship from farther away, that will 
balance things out a bit.  Not that we need the Chinese or Japanese to 
show us how to make inferior products, we've innovated quite well in 
that area in the past.

I've never understood the need we have to buy American.  Sure, money is 
going out of my pocket and into the pocket of someone in Japan when I 
stock up on Black-Black or green tea flavored Melty Kiss candies, but 
this is a global economy.  It will come back around.  Businesses span 
multiple nations as it is, I imagine that will become even more 
prevalent in the future.  For example, when I buy Sakura-flavored Kit 
Kats, where exactly does that money go?  Japan?  The US?  I don't know.

If it's done correctly, I'd like to see a "United States of Earth" that 
combined the ideas of the US and the European Union but which spanned 
all countries.  Then growing the economy would be perceived as helping 
everyone, instead of helping them at the expense of helping us, which is 
how people view it now.

Paul