The point to which I was replying asked: "Why not just buy the cheapest highest quality pasta, where ever it happens to be made?" My response was that developing American capacity to produce is more valuable than satiating the American appetite for consumption.

America's lost Puritan spirit is directly relevant to the demand side of that equation. It suppressed Americans' appetite for cheap Chinese goods, foreign luxuries, etc. It was a great virtue of the Republic. Among other things, it enabled America to develop its domestic industries and reinvest the profits in the country, because Americans were readily willing to forgo cheaper prices and higher quality of foreign-made goods for the benefit of developing domestic industrial capacity. (Note that Chinese industrial policy also is focused on suppressing domestic demand for imports.)

Contemporary trade policy is based on facilitating the cheap procurement of foreign products at the expense of domestic industries. That's a bad thing, and one of the forces enabling that bad thing is the loss of the Puritan spirit in America. We've become a country focused on hedonic satisfaction, and that makes us weak.