Yes, it is cheaper to buy an american flag made in China, but that irony sums up the situation well I believe.
There are two american companies. They both make american flags. One pays $7 an hour. Not a fortune, but a decent starting wage, is what the workers can expect.
The other is paying $7 as well. They go to China, and offsource everything. They pay the communists a finder fee, and the commies chain workers to their work areas. The flags are sold to Wal-Mart for a cheap ass price, and they can sell it for $4.99, putting the other company out of business.
How exactly is this trade? There is no "company" or even "country" we are competing with here. A company just decided to skip labor laws, taxes, worker safety, worker rights, etc to undercut their competitor.
If a German company decided that they had a revolutionary new process to make flags that was efficient, and would require less worker hours to do so, and that they could compete in our market, and they raised the capital, and bought the facility, trained the workers on the new machinery, and was able to undercut us, I would not begrudge them like I do the opposite situation.
We are americans as well as capitalists. It's plenty enough that we compete against people throughout the world, but to compete against each other to see who can screw their workforce the fastest is well wrong.
I wouldn't even mind competing against China per se as much as it pisses me the hell off that it is our people doing it.
If the Chinese government wants to start businesses and start selling stuff here, that is a different animal than american companies firing their work forces and seeding the commies with plant, equipment, material. It's crappy, it's unethical, and it's the love of the dollar before the nation.
I am not a protectionist. I think that any product made fairly overseas should have the right to compete with ours. Prison labor is wrong. We should be ashamed of our fellow americans who decide that a summer home in the hamptons, as well as the cottage in Vail, is more important than their workforce here that they dumped, or their mistreated new workers overseas.