That is certainly a valid perspective. Though I would point out that American consumers were perfectly fine with buying “overpriced” American goods during the Long Boom — in fact, it pretty much set the record on consumption. So much so that we built our entire economy based on the belief that those patterns would never change. When unions lost their power (both at work and in the government) under the Reagan administration, companies were allowed to race to the bottom in a way they couldn’t before. So now we have the scenario you describe, where companies can simply shut down factories here and relocate to a country where they can freely exploit workers and pay them little to nothing. And yes, we Americans support that by buying their products. It’s not like we can flip a switch and take us back to the Long Boom, I realize that. But we know what worked then, and when we look at stable, vibrant economies like Germany, they are doing the same things. We can turn this around, but we’ve got to stop putting corporate profits above everything else.