The Economics of "Buy American"

American manufacturing, especially in our industry, is sort of a riddle. The economic advantage gained by importing should make stateside production impossible, an easy fact driven by the math of lower production costs and profit-by-volume. Yet this is anything but the case.

American manufacturing is not only able to defy the economics of scale, it's doing so in places and markets that it should have no business competing. From T-shirts to stickers, some U.S. manufacturers have managed to beat the presumed-unbeatable question of "Can you go under the importer's margins or not?"