In a society as unequal as ours, it is somehow normal to spend a Christmas-sized budget on myriad food-service conveniences, fast fashion, bank fees, and subscription plans—to say nothing of shady medical bills, large insurance premiums, and extortionary credit-card interest rates. By contrast, experts have insisted it is patently “uneconomic” and coercive to ask consumers to spend a bit more on domestically produced goods, whether they be clothes, machine tools, toys, appliances, or furniture. As ever, we are urged to disregard the living standards and relative security of workers when trade was more controlled, to equate today’s one-click “abundance” for a life well-lived. The service-cum-servant economy continues to explode, with few asking why and for whom, while it is taken as an irreversible fact that we can neither aid domestic textiles hit by e-commerce giants like Shein and Temu nor assemble a whole computer from American-made parts.