I’ve been thinking about my comments above, and feel I ought on reflection to say that while I would prefer that the source was closer to home, I still appreciate those zillions of Chinese workers and companies making such stuff. I don’t like their government much, but that’s a separate matter.
Another of my hobbies is vintage (1950s-70s) outboards. Were it not for the Chinese supplying replacement parts for my old OMC products (e.g., electrical coils to generate current on the magneto, the originals having universally rotted out), I doubt any parts would be available, and the motors would all be dead as dodos. Domestic manufacturers just don’t bother with such trifles. The Chinese, on the other hand, seem to spot the niche interests of 62-year-old fogies like me, and then, by jingo, they magically fill them! Since the market can’t be very big, it is astonishing that the parts exist at all. As I write, I am looking out the window at a boat in the cove with a 1971 9.5hp Evinrude on it. The motor cost me something like $50 in a yard sale, non-working, but it now runs perfectly courtesy of Cheap Chinese Manufacturing, Inc., my own wits, YouTube, and a weeks’ evenings spent with very greasy hands. There’s something good in this, quite apart from the $2.5k+ saved on a modern outboard motor. (Psst: they’re nearly all Japanese these days, though all my old gals were all made in Peterborough, Ontario.)
To add a touch of further nuance, it seems to me that we’ve ourselves averted, avoided and aborted so many potential fellow-citizens over the past 50 years that I doubt that we could any longer host a full-scale manufacturing economy, such as existed a generation ago, even if we wanted one. We just no longer have the social capital. We in Canada can no longer staff even our hospitals, for goodness’ sake, and those people are nicely remunerated, socially respected, professionally promoted, educationally cosseted, and all the rest. The state we’re in is part of a bigger systematic distortion, the problems with it are more than economic, and the trouble we are in is by no means all someone else’s fault. I think there are ultimately meaning-of-life, quasi-religious issues at stake in it all, and not just questions of economics in the narrow sense. We are so busy being free all over the place that we no longer understand what it means to be human.
So enjoy yer widgets for the present, but don’t forget to propagate!
