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David Harsanyi & National Review: “Dear China: Don’t Worry, We’ve Got Your Back”
[Buck Throckmorton]

With China repressing freedom-loving Hong Kong, and having killed over half a million people with its lies and sloppy cover-up of the Wuhan Virus, you’d think that Principled Free Traders™ might lay low for a while on their quest to export every American blue collar job to China. But you’d be wrong. David Harsanyi and National Review have sent the Chinese Communist Party a love letter letting it know that there are still Americans who hate to see jobs coming back to the USA from China, and who stand shoulder to shoulder with China in its desire to destroy the American dream of a working-class job that can support a family.

The Dangerous Buy American Canard

It has all the clichés you’d expect.

For decades politicians have been promising Americans that they’ll bring back tedious, low-paying, antiquated manufacturing jobs, and Americans have been applauding them for the promise.

And there’s a lot of conflation of jobs in dying industries with those jobs that are simply exported to countries that can use slave and child labor without the worry of US labor laws.

But as sure as the Luddite’s swinging of the ax was futile, so are efforts to save dying industries by limiting economic activity.

What’s more, even if we wanted to, we probably couldn’t reverse the decline of our manufacturers. Barring a major unforeseen technological shift, old-school manufacturing jobs are going away for good. The long-term trend is undeniable.

And here it becomes clear – Harsanyi is pleading the case that we should still export every possible industry and every possible job to China, with the only exception being those specific industries that China harmed us badly in the past year. But otherwise the message is “all China all the time is awesome”, despite China being a tyrannic dictatorship.

Though there may be strong arguments for why we shouldn’t rely on tyrannies such as China for certain types of goods — pharmaceuticals, say, or technological hardware — that’s a national-security issue, not an economic one. Populists argue that Americans can do anything, build anything, and achieve anything. But the wonderful reality is that we’re lucky enough not to need to.

National Review and Principled Free Traders™ genuinely hate working class Americans who are not in their caste. But they sure do love them some Chinese dictators.