Monitor Audio Made in China?

Labor is just one way that the Chinese cut costs. I spoke to a CEO of a well known speaker maker at a show recently. Some drivers he ordered from a well known scandanavian company were apparently sourced from china without his knowledge and contrary to his contract. He doesn't know how many fake drivers got into his products. he confronted the maker and has since refused to pay invoices from them - they haven't responded at all to his accusations or asked for payment. He told me of another well known maker that had its designs stolen by the chinese maker who is now selling them under HIS brand name in the chinese market - with no renumeration to the US company.

Then there is the story of well known chinese electronics maker who pirated all his internal software - ie, never paid licensing fees for the mpg decoders etc that make his DVD/CD players run. Sure the price is cheap - if you rip someone off. Intellectual property rights simply do not exist for most Chinese (like civil rights, human rights and worker rights.)

There is no free lunch, gents. If you think you can get the same level of quality for a 95% discount, I hope you don't mind lead in your kids toys, or poison in your toothpaste and cat food.

It's a fair question to ask under what conditions things we buy are made. I don't think it's a given that if a speaker or an amp is made in the US or in Canada or in Europe, then it's made more fraily than if it's made in China or is outsourced to save money. But there is some correlation between exploitative practices and outsourcing to countries that have cruel work practices (such as employing children and denying people basic benefits and rights). I don't want to support the exploitation of others, and if that's funny to some people, so much the worse for all of us.

A lot of tears have been shed in the media about the gradual disappearance of the middle class in America. If you trace the lineage, you will find that the middle class was born of and carried by labor unions and the decline of both have been concurrent. Yes labor unions were corrupt in many cases but they were also sabotaged by newspapers that didn't want to pay their wages and politicians and industries that found paying middle class wages very uncomfortable. During that period, however, the U.S. rose to the very pinnacle of world manufacturing prowess. Today we don't manufacture much besides WMDs. Everything else is being outsourced.

The upside to all of this is that the possibility of a world economy might just put an end to war if the people who usually get them started are vested everywhere.

A friend of mine has said that Americans have just had it too good for too long and now things are starting to level out between us and the rest of the world. I don't share that view. I think our country is being strip mined and will be left a broken third world carcass within 20 years or so. I might just live to see it happen.

Macrojack,

I must admit to being a bit shocked by the "our country [America] is being strip-mined" comment. Apart from the fact that the greatest environmental danger to American soil comes from American companies paying American lobbyists who effectively "pay" American politicians voted into office (not by the wealthiest few Americans, but by the other 90% of us (or the 50-odd percent of the other 90% of us who actually bother to vote) to make it easy to strip-mine vast tracts of currently un-inhabited land so the rest of us can feel better about driving cars (SUVs) which are often less fuel-efficient than the gas-guzzlers of 30 years ago.

In terms of American "being" strip-mined, it is we who are doing it to ourselves. It is not foreigners coming in to the US forcing us to buy more gadgets more often. Everyone wants their retirement nest egg to grow 10% a year (some 3-times GDP growth) but that only comes from less profitable enterprise dying out and more profitable enterprise picking up the slack. It is the American way. It is the way America became "great" - through a long prrocess of "strip-mining" other, more-developed economies (England, Germany, France). It did not help those countries that they accelerated their own relative demise through wars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but some of those wars were started by groups looking to re-live or re-establish their declining greatness (hmmm... rings a bell).

The world is what it is. It is up to all of us to figure out how to make best use of it. If everyone wants American democracy and capitalism to become more of a social welfare capitalist economy like France, Germany, or Japan, then we will vote it into place. However, trying to get voters to address real economic issues (like education, science and development, and conservation - all of which challenge existing regimes and break out new, eventually highly profitable, technologies) is a real humdinger of a problem. Voters seem to appreciate sound bites and "feel good about America" speeches a great deal more than change. And very few seem to look to the greater good, despite the fact that a slightly smaller piece of a much larger pie that more people like is often a much better piece of pie to have.