What American Products?

A professor of mine raised a few questions the other day that gave way to some interesting answers. He asked, “How many of you think about buying American products?”…….silence. He then asked, “Do any of you try to buy American cars, does that enter into your purchase at all. The general consensus was that we 20-somethings will all buy the most low-mileage and cheap vehicle we can (aside from the few people lucky enough to have their parents buy them a new car in which case they opted for a Honda, Toyota or similar, “foreign” vehicle.) He then asked how many of our grandparents would only buy Chevy or Ford. Those of us with parents roughly over the age of 75 raised our hands. My ww2 veteran grandfather practically disowned me when he learned where most of my electronics came from. So what’s going on? Do we as a generation just not care about our economy or are our grandparents simply ignorant? I suspect the answer may be somewhere in between. We then explored the question, what if we wanted to buy all-American made products? Where would we go? The last TV manufacturing factory in America shut down years ago, most Chevy motors and transmissions are made in Asian countries, only 10 percent of a car has to be assembled in America to be considered American-made, and my Hondai is assembled somewhere in the Midwest, so what is an American product? Upon investigation I stumbled across several seemingly tacky and underdeveloped websites with an answer for that question. American made products can still be found. However, there is a nifty disclaimer on the side claiming that not all of these listings are 100% American. There are also vertically integrated apparel shops that claim to be sweat-shop free. One must wonder however, where the materials used to make these products come from. Or, if like Haynes tee-shirts made of 100% American cotton, the materials are spun in sweatshops over seas. I suppose the bigger question is whether or not any of this matters or if it’s simply a side-effect of globalization. As a post-industrialized nation, do we really want to have our society laboring away in factories (coal burning problems aside), when we have the resources to become a culture of educated experts instead?