I started reading what seemed a reasonable article on the complexities of bringing American manufacturing back. The argument seemed to make sense until it degenerated into the favorite neoliberal idea about the low quality of Americans compared to other, more adequate humans:
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders.https://x.com/Molson_Hart/status/1908940952908996984?t=iSCBRb-Ecf8jTQRB7p5gFw&s=19
It goes on in that vein but I think we get the general idea. The only conclusion we can draw from the description of these utterly horrible, useless Americans is that things would be enormously better if they could be replaced by better-quality humans.
It’s interesting that nobody ever explains when exactly Americans went so bad. Was it before, during or after their jobs were shipped overseas? Were they always such exceptionally low-quality people or is this a new development?
By the way, I found the link on Curtis Yarvin’s X account. He’s wealthy and doesn’t like Trump’s tariffs. I’m mentioning this to inject some complexity into people’s thinking.
Also, for additional complexity, the quote I posted is an almost verbatim rendering of parts of JD Vance’s autobiography.
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The conclusion I draw from that post is that the person who posted is either straight up a Chinese propagandist (the syntax suggests it– a couple of things phrased in ways you’d expect more from ESL than from native speakers), or subcontracting for them in a lazy copy-paste way.
None of that rules out a lazy actual American. But signs point to foreign origin.
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The text is a lightly edited rendition of a standard argument I’ve seen many times over the years. People rewrite it time and again to justify supporting piss-poor working conditions, mass migration or offshoring.
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I’ve seen versions of it.
I also think it’s useful to ask: Where did it come from originally? And who is pushing it now?
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…we all know Vance is a globalist shill posing as a man of the people.
We also know that US manufacturing (what’s left of it) is still far and away better quality than Chinese-made stuff. “Chinese” is synonymous with “cheap crap that will break soon” everywhere in the world. “Trung hoa” (VN for ‘chinese’) is very nearly a swear word, and used generally for poorly made/possibly toxic things. Almost the way Americans would use “sh*tty”.
My manual can opener broke a while back. Bought a new one at Walmart. It broke within a week. Didn’t want to do that again, so tracked down a US manufacturer and bought one from them. Would be shocked if I didn’t get ten years out of it. Everything about it is better quality: no absurd fat plastic handles, and the metal isn’t bendy. I think most of us have had experiences like this: dogfood that causes kidney damage, new socks that exude nauseating chemical odors even after 3 washes and then fall apart, staplers that don’t work, small appliances that break with the first use… when you get tired of wasting money on that garbage, you go looking for one that’s either made domestically, or in some other country with a good reputation: Japan, Germany, Korea, Taiwan.
American manufacturers have complained about the intractability of labor since the industrial revolution. We retooled our entire education system to try to ‘fix’ that. It’s encouraging that the “uncooperative workers” stereotype still exists. But I don’t believe we’ve ever had a reputation for producing low-quality merch. Which means the problem isn’t with low-quality workers. Might be with low-quality management and wages, though. Or disgruntled CEOs envious of the profit margins in slave-labor countries.
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I’m seeing endless articles about how we currently have a higher standard of living than ever before. Standard of living has come to mean mountains of cheap, unreliable plastic goods. Nothing else is included in the definition.
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From what sources?
To me, that’s the mark of propaganda outlets.
Nobody I know thinks we have a great standard of living right now– or not anybody old enough to remember ten years ago. A lot of people in IRL conversations are talking, like I’ve never heard before, about household appliances, how much they miss their old ones that lasted forty years and could be repaired, vs. the new more expensive ones that last 5 years or less, and when the circuitboard goes, then you find out they don’t make the part anymore and you have to buy a whole new machine. I even heard this conversation from liberal yankee city relatives who are not even a little bit plugged into anything “conservative”.
So what does it mean that you’re seeing that messaging from multiple sources at the same time? It means it’s time to mute those sources because they are taking money from somebody to say that.
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Well, guys that actually have real tools and parts because we actually like fixing things do not have ANY Chinese equipment because it is all piss poor quality. The pieces are rough , often irregular, don’t fit, and the metal is inferior, f’ng CHINESIUM ;-D
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