By Larry Craig

When I was a kid, we made everything in America. We had a strong middle class. Jobs paid good living wages. Spouses didn’t have to work in most cases. You could stock shelves in a grocery store, and your wife could stay home with the kids.

We taxed all our imports. We didn’t even have an income tax until 1913. Taxes on imports paid for most of our federal spending.

But the need for this tax became important later on for other reasons. Foreign companies generally don’t have labor unions, pensions, employer-provided medical insurance, minimum wage laws, child labor laws, standard workweek and overtime laws, OSHA, and government subsidies. How could our companies possibly compete against companies like that?

We always imported a lot of products. But they were genuine foreign products like Swiss chocolate and French wine. They cost more, and nobody cared. They were getting something unique.

Then somebody had the bright idea that trade should be free. This would make consumer goods cheaper.

Oh, and millions of our jobs went overseas. Not just in the sense that we started buying more foreign products, but the foreign products were now being made in other places.

So we lost millions of middle class jobs.

At the same time, we flooded our country with immigrants, legal and illegal. And this drove down wages.

So now we are heavily dependent on other nations for a lot of really important stuff. And in the case of China, millions of our everyday products.

As we are finding out, this international cooperation and dependency is not contributing to increased harmony and goodwill among the nations. It not only creates hardship for our people at home, but it also gives undue leverage to nations that are not friendly to achieve goals that are not in our best interests. We have less good paying jobs, and we are reliant on nations with different values and goals than ours.

We were energy independent; now we buy oil from Russia. If we stop imports to punish Russia, we hurt our own people too. That is not how government is supposed to work.

China is a tyrannical country with global ambitions, and we feed the beast with our insane dependence of it for just about everything.

What the bleep are our leaders thinking?

We let our leaders lead us down the wrong paths, while we were perhaps too busy just living our lives.

Enough.

Time for us to raise our voices and tell them to start acting in the interests of our country, like they’re supposed to. Too many of us have stood by and watched our country slowly being destroyed, and we didn’t know what to do.

The first step is to start talking about it and keep talking about it.