Traveling and my view of what's going on and where we're headed

Here's something I wrote over the summer. It's incomplete, but I'm not motivated to finish it. After reading some stuff Seth Godin has written about exclusionary trade policies, I don't think its necessarily right, though it could be argued that it is partially right, the smaller guys still need to provide excellent service. Either way, I'm not motivated to finish it, so here's what you get.

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Over the last few weeks I've had the opportunity to see a good portion of the Western US. First, my girlfriend and I drove down to the Bay Area (CA), then to the Yosemite area, and back to the tri-cities via Nevada, Eastern Oregon, and Idaho. Just this last weekend we drove to Anaconda, MT, and back (near Butte, MT).

To say that the state of the economy in these places is down is a serious understatement. Across the board, businesses are closed down, and everyone from the business owner on down seem to have a pretty downbeat view of how things are going. I think this is for a couple very legitimate reasons.

The first is that as a whole, you don't increase wealth (in terms of what you actually have, the physical goods, and the buying power for goods down the road) by shuffling paper around. You must do it by manufacturing, and on the whole, we haven't done that for ages. One of the largest sectors of our economy is debt service. This is just a paper shuffle, and you don't increase wealth by filling file boxes full of forms.

In the 50s, "buy union" was big. In the 70s, it was "buy american", from the 90s on, Walmart and their ilk took control of the market, and it was "buy Chinese." I recently saw that their American flag shirts are made in Pakistan, there is something very wrong about that. Everyone thinks that they're saving money by shopping at Walmart, but that's like saying you're saving money by paying with a credit card. Sure, the money in your pocket is more than it would be the other way, but you gotta pay for it down the road.

When you buy a $50 faucet from your Home Depot, you're putting a couple bucks into your local economy, another few into the delivery mechanism (freight companies), probably $15 into HD corporate, and the rest to China. That money's pretty much gone, out of our economy, not creating jobs, not doing a thing to keep food on any american tables. If you buy the $70 faucet, from the small, local outfit, you'll likely put $5 into the freight, $20 into the local economy, and the rest to whatever american factory that produced it, keeping more cash in our economy, and actually producing more wealth for america (we have one more faucet worth of physical goods, while having kept the cash in our borders).

Over the last 20 years, we as a nation have given our approval, through purchases, every time a company has made the decision to outsource the manufacture and support of american goods. Even goods that are made in america are no longer labeled as such, leaving someone to view products as being virtually the same, only separated by price.