By David M. Drucker, The Dispatch, April 28, 2025 - There’s this great scene in the 1984 film Moscow on the Hudson. The late actor Robin Williams’ character, a Russian musician who defected from the Soviet Union, is shopping in an American grocery store for the first time and, overwhelmed by the several coffee brands to choose from on the shelves, nearly has a nervous breakdown.
As a 13-year-old watching this flick at the height of the Cold War, I found this amusing, but was more struck by the defection scene itself, which is punctuated by a police officer telling the Soviet handlers trying to stop Williams: “This is New York City, the man can do whatever he wants.” That line, to me, was the essence of American freedom and what differentiated the United States from the USSR. But I’ve been thinking about this movie, and the grocery store scene, anew lately amid President Donald Trump slapping tariffs on virtually all foreign commodities and products imported from nearly every country on earth.
That Americans can purchase the product of their choice among countless available domestic and foreign brands is a quintessential part of living in a free society.
... many economists warn that not only will the president’s liberal use of tariffs fail to deliver the economic miracle he promises, the result will yield fewer consumer choices. ... Americans will have less freedom to buy the products they prefer. ... “Now we’re told that you can’t buy French wine even if they want to sell it to you because the common good is going to force you to buy a wine you want less in the United States,”... Seventy-five percent of the world’s GDP is produced outside of the United States. ... some commodities, like diamonds and certain rare earth minerals, aren’t sourceable at all in the U.S., while some products, like bananas and coffee beans, aren’t sufficiently available domestically to satisfy demand.
“The notion that we can make everything in America defies the reality that we have our own climate, our own natural resources that’s different than what’s available elsewhere,” she said ... “Republicans used to be in favor of free trade—both for economic benefit and as a fundamental human right to be able to buy and sell as one please,” ... (link)
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