Money

By Andrew Tobias

The biggest vote you make is not on Election Day but when you buy a car, as I just did. A new Mercedes? For the West German economy, 60,000 votes. A new Infiniti? For Japan, 40,000 votes. A new Chevy Beretta? For Detroit, 13,000.

Now don't get your yuppie BMW back up. I know you're every bit as patriotic as I am. And like you, I believe in free trade: you should buy whatever damn car you please. (And, yes, I know your Japanese car may have been built here, and that your Miata, built over there, is part American because Ford owns 25% of Mazda.)

What's all this nationalism, anyway? This is increasingly one world, and the goal is for the whole globe to prosper, not to have the Japanese shun our rice, or we their cars, out of tribal paranoia. So what if Detroit just laid off more than 24,000 workers, with predictions of more to come?

Still, we're paying for a mountain of foreign goods that will be junk in ten years with land, buildings and the rights to The Three Stooges -- things that are eternal (well, maybe not the buildings). We're like the Manhattan Indians, who had little immediate need for the island and couldn't resist the trinkets.

It's become a cliche that the Indians would have made out like bandits if they had merely invested the $24 they got at 8% (let alone in Fidelity's Magellan mutual fund). They'd have had $32 trillion by now. But the point is, they didn't take cash and invest it, they took trinkets. Today we're taking Nintendo games and Honda Preludes.

When it comes to productive tools, we should buy the best, regardless of origin, because it's in our long-term self-interest to do so. The best tools | make for the most competitive products. But when it comes to trinkets, we should think twice. Of course, with a lot of today's trinkets -- VCRs and camcorders, to name just two -- there's no way to buy American. The only choice is whether to buy at all, or whether, perhaps, to invest that money instead.

But with a car, it's different. We still make some here; and while my friends assure me their foreign ones are a lot better, they all go at about the same speed.

So this is one area in which those who lament America's low savings rate and high trade deficit could -- I'm not saying should, that's their business -- vote differently:

-- They could buy a less expensive car than they otherwise might, investing the difference, as the Indians should have, to grow richer. (Actually, many of us are not buying the trinkets with money we have. We're borrowing to buy the trinkets, which is really insane.)

-- They could buy an American car, even if it began to shimmy at 90 or 100 m.p.h. on the autobahn.

Call me un-American for likening cars to trinkets -- it's un-American not to take cars very seriously. But consider the irony as you call me un-American from behind the wheel of your $45,000 Porsche.

With these thoughts in mind, more or less, I bought a 1986 burgundy Chrysler LeBaron convertible.

I was sorely tempted to buy a new one -- they look great, and I was hardly keeping Detroit ahum by buying this used one. But it seemed an awful waste of money for someone who drives as little as I do, and no small temptation to the car thieves who've come to think of my neighborhood as their own. Instead, I decided to spend part of the $14,000 or so I saved on one of Compaq's amazing new 6-lb. computers -- in my line, a productive tool -- and to invest the rest at 8% for 363 years, as the Indians should have.