By Larry Craig

We are in the middle of a crisis unlike any we have ever known.

I am not talking about the virus. I am talking about the forced shutdown of our society, the forcing of millions of businesses to close, and the forcing of tens of millions of people out of work.

All this raises questions of what can be done to prevent this from happening again, how this will change society and culture as we know it, and what things should be changed in light of problems in our current society and culture that have now been made prominent.

I have never been a fan of globalism. We sent millions of jobs to China to save a few dollars on our small appliances, and we spent hundreds of millions of dollars combatting the emerald ash borer and the Asian long-horned beetle, both of which came over with the imports. We lost 22 million ash trees in Michigan alone, and that number is probably 10 years old.

We have medical companies in China that couldn’t export needed medical supplies to the United States, because China wanted them first.

I think it is unwise for a country to be dependent on another country for anything. Some countries have to, but we don’t.

Companies move their production overseas because it is cheaper. Most of these countries do not have an Environmental Protection Agency, minimum-wage laws, labor unions, company-based medical insurance, OSHA, child labor laws, labor protection laws, OT rules, and all sorts of other inconveniences companies here have to deal with.

You can always make something cheaper somewhere else in the world.

This is why our country for most of our history taxed imports. We didn’t even have an income tax until 1913. Taxes on imports paid for almost our entire federal budget.

Recently, when the government imposed some taxes on imports, the newspapers howled that this tax was hurting the American consumers. Well, for that matter, all taxes hurt the American consumer. At least this was a voluntary tax. You don’t have to buy that foreign-made product.

Except, of course, that we don’t make most of those things here anymore. When we tax imports, we should end up making these products here again. Won’t the prices be higher? When you have five American companies making that same small appliance, prices go down.

When companies leave our country, people here lose jobs and leave the workforce in many cases. And that costs our society enormous amounts of money in other ways. So we think we’re saving money on that cheap appliance from China, but we pay for it a dozen times over in many subtle, unnoticed, secondary ways.

When we make our stuff in other countries, those countries have control over us to some extent. If we don’t do something they want, they can just withhold our products, or worse.

Foreign products have always been available in our country. They were always more expensive, and nobody cared. But they were true foreign products, like Swiss chocolate and French wine. They weren’t American products made somewhere else and then shipped back here.

If this experience brings a lot of our jobs back home, then some good can come out of it. We won World War II due in a large part to our extraordinary manufacturing capability. We gave most of that up through globalism. We should make all of our own stuff here. Period.

Please visit my blog at poligion1.blogspot.com for articles I have written on politics, culture, and public life.