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Founding Fathers, Chinese Products

So the United States Army finally made a decent decision and decided to trash all those Made-in-China and “Chinese Material” black berets. Perhaps we should follow their lead.
A boycott? No way. Still, there may be good reasons for individuals, as individuals, to start looking more carefully at those labels.

We take as our text the American Revolution, and a certain sensibility deriving therefrom.

In October 1774, the First Continental Congress called on all true patriots to boycott British products. This was no new tactic. Ten years before, the merchants of Boston had proclaimed a boycott of British luxury goods. (The word “luxury,” back then, carried ugly connotations of decadence and selfishness.) The movement spread. Officially, it lasted two years, until the repeal of the Stamp Act. Unofficially, it ended much earlier. So did other pre-war attempts to halt or discourage commerce. So when the Continental Congress proclaimed the final act of economic resistance before the shooting started, they most likely knew full-well it wouldn’t work.

But work . . . as what? Nobody believed that refusal to purchase British hats or tea or window glass would bring the Empire to its knees. Few really believed that the colonies could or should sever all economic ties; in fact, after the Revolution, trade resumed rather smoothly. And no one believed that such non-importation, non-consumption movements could be sustained indefinitely – not in a society as given to smuggling and comfort as theirs. Advocates had something else in mind.

Refusal to use British products became a test of civic virtue, a sign of loyalty to the cause of freedom, and in some ways a mark of private character. The person who shunned British merchandise was in effect saying, “Other things are more important to me. I don’t need this.” Conversely, the person who continued to consume proclaimed, “This is what matters to me. This is the kind of person I am.”

How many consistently practiced the shunning of British goods? Probably only a very small minority . . . the same minority, perhaps, that fought an eight year war. The rest fell away when and as popular enthusiasm waned or privation became, by their personal standards, too great. They were the majority who went with the flow, who contributed and fought when convenient and/or unavoidable, and who occasioned George Washington’s 1785 remark that “We may have had too good an opinion of ourselves” in establishing a government so dependent on the virtue of its citizens.

Two years later: the Constitutional Convention, attended by men who’d lost whatever illusions they might have had about the popular ability to sustain the civic and personal qualities necessary to make a republic work. Yet they adamantly refused to assign the new federal government any role in the fostering of virtue. That would have to be done elsewhere: in the families and churches and schools, in the town meetings and local militias and juries, in business and community and voluntary association.

In the end, the Founders gambled that sufficient virtue could be created and sustained by the People, in their private lives and in their relationships with each other. Not universal virtue. Not total virtue. Just enough.

Which brings us to the matter of how we respond the next time we hear those three magic words, “Attention K-Mart Shoppers . . .”

Should the United States, as a matter of policy, institute a total or selective boycott of Communist Chinese imports? Absolutely not. It wouldn’t work; it couldn’t be sustained. Boycotts and sanctions rarely achieve very much. Nor should there be an organized movement to encourage mass boycotts. Such organizations too often turn into sinecures for their executives. And we can also forego hissy-fitting at shareholders meetings, targeting American corporations, or slick “consciousness-raising” PR.

But there is nothing to prevent any American from shunning Communist Chinese products whenever possible, shunning as in avoiding something corrupt and unclean, shunning as the Founders would have understood it. Nor is there anything to prevent Americans from actively searching for economically significant substitutes. Take two examples: clothing and toys. Why not, whenever possible, buy merchandise from the emerging economies of Eastern Europe? Why not – especially why not – buy products from sub-Saharan Africa whenever possible? A lot of business currently done with China could be transferred to those desperate places, at no net harm to the American economy. Far better to help them in their struggles than to subsidize the tyrants of Beijing.

It won’t change the world, save insofar as the eco-adage, “Think Globally, Act Locally” has meaning. Nor will it bring the Communists to their senses or their knees. But it would be a small affirmation of a certain kind of virtue. You’d have the satisfaction of knowing that, in this particular way, this is the kind of person you are. You’d be a member of a diffuse yet nonetheless real community of those who, without hype or histrionics, have chosen to shun rather than subsidize evil.

And in this way, you’d be one of those the Founders hoped would be enough to keep it all together, and to keep it going on.

Let’s Just Do It.

Philip Gold is a senior fellow of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.

Philip Gold

Dr. Philip Gold is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, and director of the Institute's Aerospace 2010 Project. A former Marine, he is the author of Evasion,: The American Way of Military Service and over 100 articles on defense matters. He teaches at Georgetown University and is a frequent op-ed contributor to several newspapers. Dr. Gold divides his time between Seattle and Washington, D.C.