MAKE MINE AMERICAN
I have two Hickey Freeman suits.
If you know anything about suits, you know Hickey Freeman is the best.
If you know anything about me, you know I got mine at a thrift store.
And someday soon I'm going to get a tailor to make them fit me. Until then, they're just for bragging.
And as a reminder of Hickey Freeman and the role it has played for a century in Rochester, New York. Hickey Freeman is the last significant vestige of a wonderful history of clothiers that made "Rochester" one of the most important names in fine men's clothing. For most of the 20th Century, the best-dressed men in America wore clothes made in Rochester.
More importantly, two or three generations of immigrant seamstresses, cutters and tailors found good employment at Hickey Freeman and the other clothing makers. Many Rochester families still look fondly back at grandmothers and grandfathers whose first jobs in America -- typically begun the day after they arrived -- were at Hickey Freeman.
I'm a fan of Hickey Freeman.
But there are limits to everything.
And yesterday word went out that unless the federal government came to its rescue, Hickey Freeman could go out of business. There's been a lot of that lately. If this or that doesn't happen, Hickey Freeman will go out of business.
That has worried Sen. Chuck Schumer quite a bit, and he has more than once been Hickey Freeman's savior. And he'd like to do it again.
But he shouldn't.
The issue this time is a complex flow of federal money that lets Hickey Freeman buy foreign wool without paying a duty on it.
If the company doesn't keep getting federal money, it threatens to shut down, putting some 400 people out of work. Consequently, Chuck Schumer is doing his, "I'll save you!" routine and has written a letter to some obscure government office where people are highly concerned with imported wool.
He shouldn't have.
He should encourage Hickey Freeman to buy American wool.
That, presumably, is the purpose of the duty -- to protect the American wool industry. Out there somewhere there are Americans raising and shearing sheep. Out there somewhere else there are foreigners raising and shearing foreign sheep. If foreign wool is like every other foreign product, it's probably undercutting the American market. See, other countries do that. They actually fight to protect and advance their industries, we simply sing to ourselves about free trade and let industry after industry go out of business.
But back to our story.
Hickey Freeman apparently likes to use foreign wool. Because the only time you have to pay the duty is if you buy foreign wool. So Hickey Freeman would pay the penalty but it wants the federal government to give it tax credits to reimburse it for the duty. Basically, it wants the government to give it back the money it pays in duty.
Which would mean there is no duty.
Which means the foreign wool can continue to undercut the American wool.
Which means the American wool industry has meaningless protections against foreign raiders.
It also means that Hickey Freeman gets a marketing advantage by being American-made suits even though they in their own purchasing decisions choose to not buy American-produced wool. So, Made In America is good if you're selling, but not if you're buying? Isn't that kind of selfish? And destructive of the country?
And if the Congress set up this duty to protect American wool, shouldn't we follow that?
And if the jobs created by Hickey Freeman in Rochester are important, then aren't the jobs created across the country by American wool producers also important?
Or is it the argument that foreign wool is somehow superior to American wool? How so, do they have a special kind of sheep overseas? That doesn't make sense. with our country's varied climate, the American agricultural product can stack up against anybody's agricultural product.
And if Hickey Freeman is going to be an American suit maker, it should use American wool. And if Chuck Schumer is going to be a U.S. senator, he should back up all the U.S. products -- even the ones that come from other states. He should encourage Hickey Freeman to use American wool, not find a way to help finance its use of foreign wool.
I love Hickey Freeman.
But I love my country more. And my country needs us to buy American.
And that includes American wool.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2010
