Trade & Manufacturing
New · August 2026
Just Tell Us Where It Was Made
Buying American shouldn’t require detective work.
“Don’t tell us what to buy.
Tell us where it was made.”
Buying American shouldn’t require detective work.
“Don’t tell us what to buy.
Tell us where it was made.”
I tell my 12-year-old son, Thomas, that China will probably be America’s greatest economic — and potentially military — adversary of his lifetime. I also tell him to pay attention to where the things he buys are made.
That was easier when I was 12.
Sam Walton was telling Americans to Buy American. And we did. Or at least we tried when we could.
We picked up a product, looked at the label and made a choice.
My son can’t do the same thing.
He can search by price, brand, size, color, customer rating and whether something will arrive tomorrow.
Try searching by where it was made.
The strange thing is that the answer is often already on the product. Federal law generally requires many imported goods to be marked with their country of origin. But online, you may not see that information before you buy.
A physical label on a physical drill worked because you could see it before you bought it. Online, almost everything is searchable — price, brand, size, color, rating, delivery date. Country of origin usually isn’t.
Forty years after Sam Walton asked Americans to buy American, we’ve made it remarkably difficult for Americans who want to do exactly that.
This isn’t necessarily because retailers oppose disclosure. The problem is that there’s not much reward for being the first retailer to do it. Imagine two retailers selling the same Chinese-made toaster for $24.99. One requires sellers to provide origin information, displays it prominently and makes it searchable. The other advertises free delivery tomorrow. The first does more work and may talk itself out of a sale. The second promises a toaster tomorrow.
Honesty is a competitive disadvantage.
So make everybody play by the same rule. Require sellers to provide origin information and major marketplaces to make it visible and searchable. Nobody has to buy American. Origin becomes another piece of product information, like price or material, and shoppers decide what it’s worth to them.
Consider two cordless drills:
$88 — Made in China.
$95 — Made in Kansas.
Some people will take the cheaper drill. They should be free to. Others might decide the Kansas drill is worth seven dollars more. They should be able to make that choice too.
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The Commerce Department estimates that domestically produced goods accounted for 63 percent of the value of manufactured goods Americans purchased in 2023. There won’t be an American option for everything. But there are far more American-made goods than our online marketplaces make easy to find.
That’s the point. Don’t tell us what to buy. Tell us where it was made.
Retailers already let people filter for “Organic,” “Fair Trade Certified,” or “Carbon Neutral” — labels that let shoppers pay more for something they value. If someone can choose the pricier green detergent because it matters to them, someone else should be able to choose the pricier Kansas-made drill for the same reason. Apparently the internet can tell me whether my detergent is saving the planet. It ought to be able to tell me where my drill was made.
There’s another reason this matters. A company deciding where to build its next production line can calculate wages, tariffs, electricity and taxes with remarkable precision. What it can’t calculate is how many customers would reward American production, because we’ve given that preference almost nowhere to register. Make origin searchable, and consumer preference becomes a market signal.
Congress, meanwhile, has been circling this remarkably simple idea for six years. Versions of the bipartisan COOL Online Act have been introduced repeatedly since 2020. In 2023, a Senate version made it through the Commerce Committee and onto the legislative calendar. It still never got a floor vote. The current Congress has versions in both the House and Senate. As of this writing, neither chamber has voted on one.
The COOL Online Act would require country-of-origin information for covered imported products to appear in the online description. That’s a good start. But six years later, Congress should finish the job — and make the information useful. In a digital marketplace, disclosure isn’t enough. It should be searchable. Let shoppers click “Made in USA” the same way they click “Under $100” or “Four Stars and Above.”
Then we’d actually find out what Americans choose.
Maybe almost everyone takes the $88 drill. That tells us something. Maybe 30 percent choose the American-made one. That tells a manufacturer something even more useful: there’s a market worth competing for.
Sam Walton never asked anyone to ignore price or quality. American manufacturers still had to earn the business. He just made sure people could see where things came from before they decided.
We haven’t taken that away. We’ve just let it drift out of view.
If enough Americans decide an extra seven dollars is worth keeping a production line running in Kansas instead of Guangdong, that’s a choice — no subsidy required, no mandate required. It only requires that they can see it.
So if we want Americans to buy American, we don’t have to order them to.
Just tell them where it was made.
Josh Dambacher is a fifth-generation Kansan, a Managing Partner at a leading international law firm, and a member of the Board of Literacy Partners. He writes The Plains Ledger.
— J.D.
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