Pat Buchanan: Economic Patriotism Is Dead

Have we sold out the greatest country in all history for a mess of pottage?
Willys built the jeeps that carried Ike’s armies across Europe. Ford built the Sherman tanks. Packard made the engines for JFK’s PT boat and for the P-40s of Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers. Studebaker built the Weasel armored personnel carrier. Chevrolet built the engines for the Flying Boxcar, Buick for the B-24 Liberator, Oldsmobile for the B-25 Mitchell Colonel “Jimmy” Doolittle flew in his “Thirty-Seconds-Over-Tokyo” raid in 1942.

...Thanksgiving week, its share of the U.S. market down from 46 percent 30 years ago to 26 percent today, GM announced the closing of nine more American plants and the dismissal of 30,000 more workers.

...That U.S. manufacturing that once employed a third of our labor force now employs perhaps 10 percent does not matter.

...That the most self-sufficient nation in history that produced 96 percent of all that it consumed now depends on foreigners for a fourth of its steel, half its autos and machine tools, two-thirds of its textiles and apparel, most of its cameras, bicycles, motorcycles, shoes, TVs, videotape machines, radios, etc., does not matter.

That tens of thousands of foreign workers are brought in each year by U.S. employers to take high-tech jobs, that U.S. factories are shut down daily here while opening in China, that professional work is being outsourced to India, that we borrow $2 billion a day to finance consumption of foreign goods—none of this matters. The nation does not matter. The country does not matter. For we are all now in a Global Economy.

Fifty years ago, a trade deficit of 6 percent of GDP, a hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs, a growing dependence on foreign nations for the vital necessities of our national life, would have been taken as signs of the decline and fall of a great nation.

Read more in the December 19, 2005 issue of the American Conservative