Not long ago, Vice Presidential candidate and now Vice President-elect J.D. Vance asserted that “a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.” There’s a lot wrong with this comment – see this Reason essay pointing out some of the issues with what Vance is saying. But I want to add one more issue to the pile – what, exactly, does Vance mean when he says these are “knockoff” products?
The term “knockoff” has usually been taken to mean a low quality, counterfeit product attempting to pass itself off as an expensive product with a prestigious brand. I’ve heard of knockoff Louis Vuitton bags or knockoff Rolexes, for example. So what would make an imported toaster a knockoff product? The toaster in my kitchen is an imported product – is it therefore a knockoff? Well, not by this measure. It’s not a counterfeit of some other brand. I can’t imagine someone looking at the toaster and calling it a “knockoff” – a knockoff of what, exactly?
Well, was the toaster “cheap?” To say something is cheap can be taken in two ways – sometimes it means a thing is inexpensive, and other times it’s meant to signal low-quality. In this case, my toaster was cheap by one measure but not the other. It’s a good, reliable, and high quality product – but it was also fairly inexpensive. Cheap in quality, no, cheap in price, yes.
But it’s also worth pointing out that a product being cheap in both senses – low cost and low quality – is not in and of itself a problem. Sometimes, buying something inexpensive and basic is a perfectly sensible option!
When I moved into my first apartment, I had to go about acquiring furniture and kitchen supplies. The first sets of furniture I bought were low cost, low quality items. And that was ok! I wasn’t looking to furnish my first apartment with high quality, expensive artisanal products that would become timeless family heirlooms. I just needed some basic stuff to make my apartment livable for the time being. As time went on and as I moved from one place to another, almost all of those items were replaced, one by one. Not having an option for inexpensive and basic furnishings wouldn’t have resulted in my first apartment being glamorously decorated with finely crafted work, handmade by Ron Swanson himself. It would have just resulting in me sitting on the floor all the time and having nowhere to put my clothes.
Calling things like imported toasters “cheap knockoff” products doesn’t seem to mean much besides signaling contempt for the items and the people who buy them. My toaster is not low quality, nor is it a counterfeit product. But it is imported, and for some people, that’s bad in and of itself.
Readers of this blog will likely be familiar with the famous short story I, Pencil by Leonard Read. But perhaps less well known is a Ted talk that makes the same point as Read’s story – a man who attempted to build his own toaster, from scratch. And when I say “from scratch,” I mean he literally hand mined the ore needed for the metal components, using hand made tools. But he quickly discovered just how intricate even the “cheapest” toaster actually is. He says,
Working on the idea that the cheapest electric toaster would be the simplest to reverse-engineer, I went and bought the cheapest toaster I could find, took it home, and was kind of dismayed to discover that inside this object I’d bought for just three pounds ninety four, there were four hundred different bits made out of a hundred plus different materials.
Even the cheapest, lowest quality toaster available on the market is an absolute marvel. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter wrote about how, “Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.”
In the same way, capitalism makes home appliances easily available to even very low income people at very low prices. This deserves more than the snide condescension and derision of “cheap knockoffs” preached by populists. For the cost of just a few dollars, Thomas Thwaites was able to acquire a toaster infinitely better than anything he could make himself with months of effort. Vance is wrong. The fact that even the poorest Americans can find a toaster in their price range is not a problem that needs to be solved. It’s a thing of beauty.
READER COMMENTS
Richard W Fulmer
Jan 3 2025 at 11:01am
America doesn’t suffer from “a million cheap, knockoff toasters;” it suffers from millions of cheap, knockoff bits of bumper-sticker logic pouring from the mouths of its politicians. Vance’s quip echoes Bernie Sanders’ equally shallow claim: “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants when children are hungry in this country.” Sanders casually dismissed people’s preferences and overlooked their allergic reactions to different chemicals and fragrances. Both politicians show contempt for the ways free individuals choose to spend their limited resources, proposing to limit that freedom based on their own priorities. Why anyone would entrust such people with power over our lives is beyond me.
David Seltzer
Jan 3 2025 at 1:01pm
Kevin: Nicely argued. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance asserted that “a million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.” I suspect Vance is singing to his choir of manufacturing laborers. There are external costs to myriad consumers deprived of cheap toasters. The cost of making the trade-off between keeping a current toaster or buying a more expensive toaster is to be considered. Conversely, if a million cheap knockoffs are available at market, there are lower external costs.
john hare
Jan 3 2025 at 6:42pm
From toasters to cars to immigration to Jones act to……. I suspect there are dozens to thousands of brakes on human progress.
Ahmed Fares
Jan 3 2025 at 9:02pm
Trade makes a country richer. It also makes its economy more fragile.
Here’s an example:
Why Shortages of a $1 Chip Sparked Crisis in Global Economy
Felix
Jan 5 2025 at 10:16pm
No, trade makes economies more robust, because it provides more alternative sources at lower prices, and it enables more people to have more choice in what they buy.
If limiting trade to within national borders is better than trade across national borders, then trade within state borders should be better yet, trade within city borders even better, and trade entirely within individual houses the best yet.
Astoundingly to some, this is not the case.
Anders
Jan 7 2025 at 3:02pm
I am stuck in poorer, conservative Europe. When I lived in the greatest country in the world (a conviction firm and universal even back then when northern Europe was at market exchange rates as rich per capita, so perhaps iron clad now that the US has surpassed us big time and political rhetoric is about the plight of workers making twice as a much as a surgeon here (and highway police officers five times as much as ours) struggling to… put food on the table), I seem to remember that US toasters and appliances were all in premium segments. A whirlpool stove, let alone the huge kitchens with marble, kitchen islands, and restaurant quality gas stoves, here is a luxury that you might find in the homes of ceos and music stars.
Why on earth would America want to return to wasting resources on competing in lower range commodities that China can do for them at much lower cost? I know this is a liberal (I can’t bring myself to say libertarian just because Americans insist liberal means illiberal) forum that will agree, but I am seeking to understand how the logic could possibly fly in the first place, especially if the us does not even have vested interests from a low range toaster production sector anyway?
The part about all the choices that we don’t need made me think about when back then I first saw a large US grocery store. The cereal isles alone were mindblowing, both in quantity and, back then at least, in the sheer blatant size and unhealthiness, save for a few packets of expensive German muesli at the end that people I know kept mentioning they are eating as if a point of pride, cosmopolitanism, and moral virtue.
From there, the sheer scope and ostentatious nature of consumerism struck me over and over. Tv commercials showed a world so reductive, mind numbing, and intrusive that trumped the dystopia of brave new world. People took the cars just to get from one store to the adjacent one a few hundred feet away.
So i get the sentiment there. But when I visited a few years ago, after being denied entry for having visited iraq working for the us department of state after one of those Kafkaesque security checks with that peculiar us veneer of cliches, inane trick questions, and Oscar worthy refusal to see an ounce of humour in even the patently ridiculous, I saw the change. The us that had taken consumerism to such extremes one way was now at the forefront in many other directions. Even medium sized cities in flyover country had a huge variety of ethnic or healthy and creative dining options that in europe would be the remit of pockets of London. You could still get tv dinners, gallon sized soft drinks, and celebrate the perfection of fried butter at fairs. But the options for finding your own preferences, in food, housing, lifestyle, careers were enormous compared to here.
Trump wants to undo this with tariffs and isolationism and throwing out dozens of millions of undocumented immigrants. Kamala and Bernie with price controls, regulation, and evs. Both hate the enlightenment liberalism and Burkean constitution they revere. Both want more state. But at the same time, few would actually claim that the federal government is blazingly efficient at, say, building high speed rail or ev charging posts or affordable housing. And noone, as someone in this bubble quipped, would want the Department of motor vehicles to be in charge of… motor vehicles.
Perhaps that is one reason why the us is thriving despite doing so much to avoid it.