Are We Shopping Against Our Own Interests?

Elizabeth Cline believes so:

Basically, huge fast fashion chain stores like Target, H&M, Forever 21, or Old Navy—the places most Americans shop in today—are importers. They're huge corporations that are obsessed with lowering their production costs, so they scour the world looking for the cheapest places to produce their products—and they're not in the United States. The more we patronize and support these corporations, the harder it is for U.S. industries to survive. That's why we've seen, in a very short period of time, most of our garment/textile trades disappear. In 1990 we made almost half of our clothing here; today it’s two percent.

Sheldon Richman, on the other hand, makes the case for free trade:

"When you read a label which says ‘made in China,’ it is not made in China," [economist Sudha] Shenoy says. "It is made by the world economy, by the globe as a whole. . . . It is impossible to make anything in one country. And that is why, as Mises pointed out, the market economy does not respect political frontiers. Its field is the world."

Previous coverage of Cline's book, Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, here and here.