If you compare the 1973 basket of goods and services used to develop the Consumer Price Index with the one from 1947 you will find that average American worked 37 percent LESS man hours to buy the same goods. All problems with the CPI exist in both time periods. That was before free trade started destroying us.

India has done very well exploiting their cheap labor to produce a $8 billion trade surplus with the US. That trade surplus puts Americans out of work and causes lower wages.

If you compare the 1973 basket of goods and services used to develop the Consumer Price Index with the one from 1947 you will find that average American worked 37 percent LESS man hours to buy the same goods. All problems with the CPI exist in both time periods. That was before free trade started destroying us.

India has done very well exploiting their cheap labor to produce a $8 billion trade surplus with the US. That trade surplus puts Americans out of work and causes lower wages.

So what are you saying, we should be overpaying paying $99.20 per shoe? Talk about dead-end plans.

No question there are health hazards and negligent governments in many parts of the world. But at the end of the day, we don't run those places and have limited leverage to change them. And I further believe there's no problem so bad we can't make it worse, and withholding investment to force them to bend to our standards will often do just that.

Their best hope is economic development, which is exactly what allowed us to retire our own sweatshops, afford higher air and water quality standards, and embrace the other virtues on your list. It's not a short-term fix. But denying them jobs until they clean up their act will not bring it about any sooner.

In China, a gem worker gets fatal silicosis in a few years. I don't agree that we should let an uneducated worker there be crippled for life because you think he knows better than us what's best for him. Labor and environmental standards are a legitimate thing to insist on in trade relations, because it IS our right to decide if there's a social or environmental cost we are not willing to support in our search for cheaper goods. It's not always about the almighty profit motive.

Only if we want to preserve America's global economic strength. We can have a competitive manufacturing sector, but only if we have a productivity edge that makes up for our higher wages. We used to, but we've been losing it. Unless you want to see wages fall and jobs continue to disappear, we have to increase our productivity. Competition is the only way to do it.

“Do we want to support slave labor, child labor, unsafe sweatshops, environmental degradation overseas?”

Although slave labor is fairly black and white, safety, job desirability, child welfare policies and environmental standards are all matters of degree, so this is really a “who gets to decide?” question. If people enduring grinding poverty choose a job in the sweatshop over their alternatives, I'd be very reluctant to claim I know better than they do what's best for them.

Second, do we want to support slave labor, child labor, unsafe sweatshops, environmental degradation overseas? Is that what we support in order to save a buck on that pair of shades?

What lower prices? Obviously, the lower prices of the imported goods Jazz exhorts us to resist. If you want to compare with 1973, you'll need to account for the improved quality over that time, of which CPI does a poor job. We may well be working 12% more to buy cars that are 30% safer, phones that are 40% more wireless, pocket calculators that are 10 million times more powerful.

Your multiplier effect is a wonderful thing, and you get a larger one when you trade more broadly. India used to have a strong “Buy Indian” program that kept it one of the poorest nations on earth. Since liberalizing in 1991 it has taken off and is now threatening mighty America.

One of the great myths of free trade is that while workers are hurt consumer benefit. This is a foolish argument.

First let us define a consumer as someone who buys stuff. Let us define a worker as someone who gets money to buy stuff from work. How many people are in one group and not the other? Not very many. Retirees get their money to buy stuff from past work. Students, for the most part, get their money from the work of their parents and future work. Laid-off workers get their money from past and future work and will benefit more from “Buy American” than most.

Second and more important, what lower prices? If you compare the current basket of goods and services used to develop the Consumer Price Index with the one from 1973 you will find that today the average American must work 12 percent more to buy stuff today compared with 1973. I use 1973 because that is the year the Average Weekly Earnings of American workers last established a high. It has declined since.

When you buy a domestic product the economy gets what Keynes calls a multiplier effect when those who benefit from the purchase get more money to also buy something. When the purchase is of a foreign product the multiplier benefits, in part, the foreign economy. The benefit is not short term.

The implication of “help the American worker” is “screw the American consumer” by making him pay extra. There are a great many American workers who are having a tough time of it in a down economy, but there are at least as many consumers who are just as badly off. Laid-off workers are still consumers; making them pay more for goods and services is kicking them when they're down.

Even paying more to buy American does our workers only the same short-term favor grade inflation does our students. Our trade balance is what it is because we're not as productive as we like to think. By rights the dollar should fall to the point our trade is balanced and trips to what we consider third-world countries start to look pretty expensive. What we need to do is make ourselves more productive and more competitive, invest in our schools, support our corporate economy. Disguising the signals to the contrary helps not at all.

Yes, you may say, all well and good if those wicked Elbonians would just play fair, stop subsidizing their own industries, and compete on a level playing field. And I say that's like moaning that we lost the game only because of the ref's bad calls. Our trade has been in deficit since 1976, so maybe we've been getting bad calls for 33 years. Or maybe we need to improve our game.

One possible solution is to just educate the heck out of everybody in the country, and make sure that even if something is physically constructed in another country, that the structure of how it's made — from concept and design to management of production to procurement of materials — is done here in the States. A lot of that is happening now, and we as country do seem to produce better management and creativity than other places to which our jobs are being outsourced. We must make sure, if we go in this direction, it means it's vitally important to keep things like art, math and science, public speaking, and group work strong in our schools. If we're going to continue to live our lifestyle without being able to afford to pay our own workers to do the low-paying, low-skilled work, we're going to have to make up for it by creating highly skilled workers, so that those jobs really _can't_ be shipped overseas.