Buying Made in the USA = Perpetuating Lavish Lifestyles of Excess

People complain that by choosing products which are manufactured in China where the workers are paid $5 US per day, that I am holding them in poverty. My simple trip to Bed, Bath, & Beyond makes me the big, bad, rich man keeping the rest of the world down in poverty, and perpetuating their misery.

Let's spin this around for a second. If buying stuff made in third world countries perpetuates poverty, what lifestyle are you supporting if you buy local? If you purchase a product made in the USA, you are supporting the lavish American lifestyle, you are pumping more and more money into a lifestyle which is based on overconsumption, negative savings rate, loads of debt, and purchasing more and more stuff, and displaying wealth as conspicuously as possible.

Is this the lifestyle which you want to support? Most every American - including even factory workers - enjoy lavish lifestyles of excess, which the developing world envies, such as:

• Personal vehicle ownership, including all of the energy consumption and environmental mess that goes with it
• Humongous, energy inefficient houses, most likely backed by a lengthy debt/mortgage repayment term
  
• Getting out of a debt is a bigger problem than getting a loan
• Air-conditioning
• So much food that obesity is a bigger problem than malnutrition
• Endless gadgets, big screen TV's, satellite packages and fancy iPods
• Pensions & Retirement packages which start age 50 or even sooner

We can talk about personal vehicle ownership as a starter. Only 13% of the human population owns their own vehicle; personal vehicle ownership is the exclusive domain of the world's über-wealthy. The Chinese factory worker will never be able to afford their own car, but neither will the overwhelming vast majority of the population. Lack of car ownership is normal by global standards, it is not poverty. Is that my problem as a consumer? Will choosing the American-made product over the Chinese-one help bank roll the Chinese worker's car? According to my calculations, such a choice would take away exactly what is standing in the way of car ownership for the Chinese worker. The extra income going to the American worker now means he can buy a few extra gallons of gasoline (a finite natural resource), shrinking the world supply of gasoline by that much, and making it that much more difficult for the Chinese worker ever to achieve that dream.

Should every human being be entitled to own a car? 25% of the world's oil is consumed in the USA even though we are only 5% of the earth's population. Oil fields are operating at full capacity all over the world, and tanker ships are headed to American coastlines night and day to fulfill America's insatiable appetite for more oil to fuel their vehicles. I can do the math and see that if the whole world lived like an American we would need 4x as much oil as the world currently produces, and my guess is that if we produced and consumed that much, it would cause the planet would burn into a humongous fireball.

Is this a good thing?

Look, I am no financial saint. By global standards, my lifestyle is extremely lavish, though by the standards of my country I live like a pauper (I'm exaggerating, but not by much). Yes, I own a car. Yes, I keep talking about buying a pair of shoes which costs as much as my average brother on the planet earns in a month, while some of them don't have any shoes at all. Plenty of people all over the world work much harder than me and will unlikely enjoy the comforts which I have been handed ever since I won the ovarian lottery. I don't make any apologies for this, nor feel guilty about this, and neither should you; the rest of the countries are playing hardball, catching up fast, and don't need our help outside our ability to consume their stuff.

My vision and hope for the future is that the global playing field evens out a little bit. The gap in world wealth right now is just humongous. People like the Chinese factory worker, the Indian farmer, and the African miner deserve just as comfortable lifestyles as the people working just as hard and doing the exact same job in rich countries. But the current lifestyle in rich countries is not sustainable or scalable to the whole planet for environmental as well as economic reasons. The planet would self-destruct if every human being lived the lifestyle of an American factory worker, but it would be humming along great if everybody lived like the Chinese factory worker. So the intuitively obvious conclusion to me is that over the long-term the lifestyle will land somewhere between the two. A lot of wealth will be democratized (particularly technology, which will continue to get cheaper and cheaper, and empower billions and billions of more people), while some things (such as energy, and natural commodities) will have to be divided more equally than they are now.