‘Buy American’ has little meaning in today’s world of globalized supply chains
By Kevin D. Williamson
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449762/made-america-not-important-21st-century‘Made in America Week” at the White House has come and gone, amounting to . . . not much.
There was a terrific parade of American-made goods, some of them near to my heart: Stetson hats and
Gibson guitars among them.
But the newly energized nationalized among us may not want to look too closely at those sentimental
“All-American” claims.
Gibson makes some of the finest electric guitars in the world, along with some very fine acoustic guitars,
mandolins, and much more. It was founded by a child of immigrants and currently is owned by an immigrant,
Henry Juszkiewicz, whose parents moved from Poland to Argentina before he found his way to the United
States. For much of its history, Gibson was a Panamanian company, and while Gibson-branded guitars are
indeed made in the United States, there is much more to Gibson Brands than American-made guitars:
Chinese-made Baldwin pianos, Chinese- and Japanese-made Epiphone guitars, Boston-based Cakewalk
Software, Malaysian-made Cerwin Vega audio components, a stake in Japanese electronics firm Onkyo,
and much more. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service took an interest in Gibson’s wood imports from
Madagascar a few years back, which came via a German intermediary. Which is to say, in its triumphs
and in its troubles, Gibson is a truly global company . . .
. . . One of the great enduring stupidities of modern economic life is the belief that buying American is
somehow beneficial to the United States as a whole. A related daft notion, very popular among our
progressive friends horrified at the chauvinism of “Buy American” campaigns, is that buying local helps
your local community and economy. This stuff has been studied and studied and studied, and the short
version is that buy-American/buy-local efforts amount to approximately squat. It makes sense if you
think about it: You can buy a bag of green beans from your local farmers’ cooperative and feel good
about yourself, but that farmer is going to use the money to pay his bills, probably to a faraway financial
company that holds his mortgage, a carmaker overseas, or a tractor-financing company abroad. He might
buy his diesel from a local retailer, but that diesel very likely comes from crude oil drilled in some faraway
place (from Canada to the Middle East) and refined in another faraway place. The components that went
into those green beans — seeds, fertilizer, farming equipment — probably weren’t locally made. Money
likes to move around.
Does “Buy American” create or protect American jobs? Almost certainly not. That’s because we all buy
lots of different things, and paying more than you have to for an inferior General Motors product doesn’t
stick it to Honda so much as it sticks it to . . . everybody else you might have bought something from
with that money you spent making yourself feel patriotic about buying a car assembled in Michigan out
of components from all over God’s green Earth. . . .
Fair disclosure: I play Gibson and Epiphone guitars. Four Gibson Les Pauls and a Gibson Flying V made
in Memphis (two of the Les Pauls were made in the Custom Shop); and, an Epiphone Flying V made
in Indonesia. And I'm happy to death with all six of those guitars. (For those who were wondering, I
play them strictly through Fender amplifiers, in my case either a Princeton Reverb or a Blues Junior.)
Where they were made was less relevant to me than how well they're made, how good they sound,
and how playable they are. I'm
glad five were made in Memphis, but I'm
not unhappy
with the one made in Indonesia, either. And I
like having
choices in what I buy and, when
it comes to music, play.
