This is exactly my thought. If you get clothes by the ton at less than cost because they're used, you don't need a domestic textile industry. Your local fashi

This is exactly my thought. If you get clothes by the ton at less than cost because they're used, you don't need a domestic textile industry. Your local fashionistas can still buy the same fabrics and designs as New York or Paris, if they want them. Besides that, if you stop soaking up the supply by accepting imports, you certainly aren't going to be able to export competitively. In my opinion, third world countries should be sending their folks to Delaware to study corporate law, and to various island nations to study offshore banking. After they have the principles down, pass legislation that turns the country into a sweatshop/boiler-room for intellectual property lawsuits and tax avoidance schemes. The current state of the world is that you have to be rich to get rich, so if you pretend to be rich for long enough, you have a decent chance of either making that real or collapsing in a boneless pile of fraud. And if the latter would happen anyway, there's really no point in actually doing anything useful or productive to keep up appearances.