Most of you Baby Boomers out there likely know where the title of this post came from. Even though I use the film as the header above that is not what this post is about. Instead, it is about how we are giving up our country and maybe the world, just to get a few dollars more into our pockets

The movie with the above title came out in 1967. There were a string of movies that put Clint Eastwood on his road to fame. They were called Spaghetti Westerns as they were low budget films made in Italy. I enjoyed those films, but like I said above, this post is not about that.

1967 was just about the time that companies started moving the manufacturing facilities out of the U.S. I went into the consumer products business world three years later and quickly found out why that was happening.

I worked for a company that was determined to keep our manufacturing facilities in the U.S., but month after month in those beginning years we lost market share. Our product only cost a couple of dollars more than our competitor who moved their products off shore. After a half dozen years or so the writing was on the wall. Either go to the cheap labor or go out of business. The American consumer was not about to pay even a 1% difference to buy American made. Over the fifty or so years since that time the migration to foreign produced goods was complete.

It seems ironic that there is now so much grumbling about everything being made in China. The ‘Buy American Made” slogans did nothing to convince people that what we have today was coming.

And now for a few dollars more, too many of us seem willing to let a future despot, or at least one who hopes to be that, become the leader of our country for another four years. Nothing matters to him except making the deal for a few dollars more. Morality, empathy, and anything else that gets in the way is quickly cast aside.

Now it seems that our greed for a few dollars more is moving to the next stage. We are putting mountains of debt out our children and grand children to pay off. To make matters even worse, if that is really possible, we seem to be willing to ignore the life threatening problems of climate change simply because we don’t believe it to be imminent!

I wonder if anyone will “get” it when we close the door. I wonder if they will realize that they gave up everything for a few dollars more in their pocket starting about 50 years ago.

For a few dollars more…