The Establishment Rethinks Globalization

It's about time.

Do you think the profiteers give a damn about their employees? Nope - if everyone else in their state were jobless but they were raking in profits they'd be happy. The pressure for reform must come from the 'typical' american - it's not going to come from the corporate royalty, that's for sure.

China began serious reforms over 20 years ago when Deng Xiaoping was barely alive. In just a few years they were manufacturing state-of-the-art precision optics. I could get them to build me a very nice optical system for about 1/10th of what it would cost me in the USA. The Chinese government was determined to make China a technological leader. While corporations like Ford churn out crap cars in South East Asian nations for local consumption, the Chinese are working on cars with better emissions control and better fuel efficiency than Ford produce in the USA - and if you've seen cars in China you'll know those cars aren't really for local consumption.

I had a business meeting the other day and one of the points that came up is that we could not compete with China for cost and volume production - and we would not contract the Chinese to do the work either - let them spend some time reverse-engineering our product. Of course the Chinese aren't out to copy and outdo everyone else - they haven't got a large enough skilled workforce to do it - but on many fronts they are impossible to compete with.

I think what is important for the USA is that we bring manufacturing jobs back and produce high-quality products. Even products from Mexico are pretty crappy compared to what we used to make in the USA. In China you have two extremes - high quality on one side and the shabbiest crap imaginable on the other. The USA has half a chance of recovery if it can gear up manufacturing before the Chinese expand their skills and improve quality across the board.

So in all I really don't see 'Globalism' slowing down and I'm not paying $300 for a hard disc I can get for $100 so I'm not for general protectionist policies either.

There are similar trends for really high-tech stuff as well - there are some items originally developed in the USA and licensed to Israel, UK, Germany, France for production and some of these items are no longer produced in the US so we import them. It's extremely embarrasing that we cannot compete with the UK, Germany, or France - they certainly don't have Chinese wages there.

US manufacturing just isn't what it used to be. Just look at the case with steel - for over 30 years now we've been producing lower grade steels at higher costs and it is only protectionist measures which prevent the local industry from dying; for those 30 years various members of the EU have been complaining about this restriction of trade. What's our excuse for not matching or outdoing what the Europeans are doing?

The problem is not only cheap labor in China, something else is terribly wrong in the USA. Protectionist measures may only ensure that the USA gets expensive locally produced shit. We need to fix whatever is wrong inside the USA and we'll be able to compete.