The clamor to "Buy American" is understandable, especially when heard from out-of-work auto workers who've weathered a long winter and face a bleak spring. I have less sympathy, however, when I hear it from CEOs who, with one hand, are filling their pockets with megabuck bonuses (I mean, who do these guys think they are--baseball players?), while passing out pink-slips with the other.
But "Buy American" is a simple solution to a knotty problem--one I wouldn't even try to analyze here even if I fully understood it. However, I do know that "Buy American" isn't the remedy.
To illustrate, what's more all-American than driving to a movie, then stopping for a hamburger afterwards? Well, if you drive a Mercury Tracer to a Cineplex Odeon theater to watch a Columbia Pictures film before eating at Burger King, you'll be driving a Mexican-assembled car to a Canadian-owned theater to watch a Japanese-owned film and eating at a British-owned fast-food emporium. From the pens that we write with (Bic's parent company is in France) to the ice cream we eat on hot summer afternoons (Haagen-Dazs is British), it's getting nigh impossible to find 100 percent "American-made." I'm not suggesting that this is bad--I'm simply saying that somewhere up or down every food chain there hangs a non-U.S. skeleton. In short, "Buy American" is a mythical solution to an economic conundrum.
Because auto manufacturing is an overused example of typical American businesses, let's look at a different sort of enterprise, this magazine for instance.
For starters, DDJ is owned by M&T Publishing, the parent company of which is Markt & Technik, one of the largest technical publishers in Germany. Monica Berg, our Managing Editor, is also German--and she has the accent to prove it. Technical Editor Ray Valdes was born in Bolivia and lived in six continents before settling down in the U.S. Associate Editor Tami Zemel was born in England, grew up in Kansas, and went to college in Israel, where she majored in (naturally) French. My fling with internationalism involved a few years in Canada that resulted in a college diploma, a son, and at least one case of frostbite. Then there's Editor-at-large Michael Swaine, widely believed to exist in Cyberspace. But to my mind the most "foreign" of all is Senior Technical Editor Mike Floyd--a native Californian.
The magazine you're now reading was printed on paper made from Canadian trees, the phototypesetting machines used to put the words on the paper are from Germany, and the cameras used to shoot the photos on the cover are made in Sweden and Holland. Nevertheless, the creativity behind DDJ and the principles the magazine represents were born in the U.S. of A.
Slightly more than 20 percent of DDJ's readers reside outside the U.S. (see, for instance, the "Letter" from reader Yuri Elik of St. Petersburg, Russia on page 8), we often publish articles written by non-U.S. programmers, our articles are commonly reprinted around the world, and there's even a Russian edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal. When I recently logged on to M&T Online, readers from both New Zealand and Hong Kong were online.
The international flavor of DDJ isn't unique within the software industry. Walk into just about any software house in the U.S. and you'll be able to speak with someone in a language other than English. Furthermore, development tools for "internationalizing" application software are a coming thing.
My point is that protectionist principles don't work (if they ever did) because the U.S. isn't (and never was) an economic island. The health of our economic system depends on others, and they depend on us. If you doubt this, ask General Electric, which last year recorded $2.6 billion in imports and $8.16 billion in exports.
Much more so than processes such as automobile manufacturing or home building, software development defies boundaries--technical, creative, or political. The best way programmers can meet these challenges is by coming up with better ideas, working smarter, and using the most innovative tools and techniques to write the best software.
Continuing on the international front, negotiations edge forward with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the phenomenally broad international trade treaty that, if accepted, will among other things dictate the rules governing software copyrights and patents.
The draft treaty covers all aspects of international trade, and will be presented to the U.S. Senate as a package deal. Because major parts of the treaty will be quite beneficial to the U.S., there's real pressure to accept the whole enchilada. However, the draft requires all countries that accept the agreement to have patents that cover software techniques. It would also rule out any proposal in the U.S. to protect software from patents or revamp the patent system.
Thus, sweeping changes in U.S. intellectual property law will be forced upon us and cast in stone, without any consideration by the House of Representatives, and without an opportunity for the Senate to consider them individually on their merits.
Chew on that the next time you bite into a British burger.
Copyright © 1992, Dr. Dobb's JournalThe GATT Gotcha