That's what tariffs are for. These are macroeconomic decisions, not decisions that should flow down to individuals, to be thought of as their responsibility and their moral failing.
Individuals shouldn't be expected to choose to buy American. It's a cost with an at best extremely distant (in time and space) benefit for an individual, and a non-existent benefit unless everyone does it. Instead, when goods are produced by foreign slavers and polluters, they should either be barred from import (if they're morally impossible to support) or taxed arbitrarily in order to optimize the local market, for which discriminatory taxes are not a factor.
But all if this is bad faith reasoning in general. What is produced is shit clothing, with shit treatment of the workers producing it, and intentionally outmoded by planned fashion cycles. If it were quality clothing being imported, labor costs would be a much smaller part of the costs, and therefore of the potential lost margins if owners failed to maximize the exploitation of labor. Tariffs wouldn't even effect quality imported clothing. What they would do is kill the shit imported clothing market, and allow us to redevelop a shit domestic clothing market if the minimum wage were low (i.e. sweatshops), or if we raise the local minimum wage, force a quality local clothing market.
> I'm wrong, go start a company that makes shirts in the US. You will make a fortune because demand is completely unmet.
The belief that macroeconomic problems should be solved by spontaneous generation is a form of religious capitalism. The fact that it doesn't ever happen is pointed to as the evidence that we are always at an eternal maxima. It's a practiced, self-serving denial that our economy is always actively managed by a very few people.
You seem to think I'm trying to make some moral point but nothing I said has the slightest thing to do with morality. It is simple fact of incentives and human behavior.
Individuals shouldn't be expected to choose to buy American. It's a cost with an at best extremely distant (in time and space) benefit for an individual, and a non-existent benefit unless everyone does it. Instead, when goods are produced by foreign slavers and polluters, they should either be barred from import (if they're morally impossible to support) or taxed arbitrarily in order to optimize the local market, for which discriminatory taxes are not a factor.
But all if this is bad faith reasoning in general. What is produced is shit clothing, with shit treatment of the workers producing it, and intentionally outmoded by planned fashion cycles. If it were quality clothing being imported, labor costs would be a much smaller part of the costs, and therefore of the potential lost margins if owners failed to maximize the exploitation of labor. Tariffs wouldn't even effect quality imported clothing. What they would do is kill the shit imported clothing market, and allow us to redevelop a shit domestic clothing market if the minimum wage were low (i.e. sweatshops), or if we raise the local minimum wage, force a quality local clothing market.
> I'm wrong, go start a company that makes shirts in the US. You will make a fortune because demand is completely unmet.
The belief that macroeconomic problems should be solved by spontaneous generation is a form of religious capitalism. The fact that it doesn't ever happen is pointed to as the evidence that we are always at an eternal maxima. It's a practiced, self-serving denial that our economy is always actively managed by a very few people.