Distrust is all we have

"Is it" inevitable that we buy goods from an overseas economy so as to present the purchase's as cheap to our own citizens. Affordability is of course important but it begs the question, if a product is not affordable, other than when it is made in a sweat shop in Asia, then it perhaps these goods shouldn't be presented to the population in the first place.

Everything has value and of course it is proportional, so many factors are at play both in the manufacturing country as well as the consuming nation.
Is there somewhere a moral imperative which should make us consider the implications of our purchase and hand in glove with that thought, the moral imperative of the industries, such as advertising, which make enormous amounts of money seeding our minds to purchase things we could well do without.
The questions raised by invoking such concepts as an ethical dilemma and moral imperatives, is indeed fraught with complexity.

As an example, the amazing disparity of views voiced on a radio program this evening called "The Moral Maze" where the participants were asked their views on the numbers immigrants we as a nation should be asked to take into this country as "needy people".

The terms refugee, economic migrant, are the equivalence of needy people and there seemed to be in some of the panellists mind that we have a moral duty to offer all we can irrespective of the cost.
The concept of diminishing returns is well understood but diminishing compassion was a struggle for some. The idea that you should care most for your family, your friends and then your countryman and finally people of different cultures from the other side of the world in descending order, which would in some way inevitably place the immigrant at the back of the queue. This was a total anathema to at least two of the people discussing the current situation. The moral precept was for them a philosophical touch stone based on the concept that we are all part of god's people.
The gulf between the moralist and the pragmatist was never wider and we do a nation no good by placing them in the emotional firing line. We do them no service by manipulating the heart strings with pictures of very young children and then in reality substitute them for young adults on the basis that they too deserve our sympathy.
If the story is corrupted for political ends then the trust is also broken and the tentative relationship between the governor and the governed is broken with serious consequences. That single line of policemen who can hold a baying crowd at bay is part of the trust the people place in a civilised society towards the running of that society.
In my day a single policeman could hold order, today it would take 50 !! That is the measure of the disruption to our psyche which the politician, hand in hand with the immediacy of television and the "sound bite" has brought where now the default position is that, "he/she is lying.
Where is morality when distrust is all we have ?