Made in China


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Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 at 1:12PM :

In Reply to: Re: Schweinfurt posted by MoparNorm on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 at 8:19AM :

They won't say "Made in China" because there's a serious effort underway to eliminate the "country of origin" requirements. The claim is that since there's no import duty for most things any more, it doesn't matter where they were made, and furthermore, the pieces were probably made in lots of different countries. But regardless of whether or not things say where they were made, the fact remains that the US could not fight another WWII today. We won WWII on two fronts because we could make more stuff, from scratch, faster than our enemies could. Prior to WWII, Japan imported most of its oil from California! We had mines and smelters and mills that could supply the raw materials for anything. Where I used to live in Washington, the Weyerhauser Mill A made dissolving pulp that all went into gunpowder (nitrocellulose), while where I live now in Idaho, the Bunker Hill and smelter mine ran under direct military control producing lead for bullets and batteries as fast as 3 shifts of miners could mine it. Now, we have no smelters in this country, few underground mines, and the only remaining producer of dissolving pulp that I know of is Japanese owned. Do we even have any integrated steel mills that can turn taconite, coal, and limestone into rolled steel plate anymore, or are they all "mini-mills" that remelt scrap? I know there is no US owned cement company left. There are US owned concrete companies, but they buy their cement from foreign companies operating quarries and kilns located in the US. Then you get into electronics and try to find US sources for electronic components. There are still a few exremely expensive mil-spec domestic producers, but try to build a GPS or a cell phone or a laptop computer using only "made in USA" parts.

BTW, I take the "Made in Schweinfurt" bearing story with a big grain of salt. First of all, I've almost never seen any part stamped with its CITY of origin. I say almost because I have some 150-year old chisels and plane irons stamped "Sheffield". Secondly, the US was quite capable of producing plenty of good ball bearings back then. Lastly, my father was in on the Schweinfurt raid and he never mentioned anything about hearing that story. I think the Germans were just trying to salvage some pride.

One case where the US couldn't do without German technology, however, was in optics. Carl Zeiss made the best optics in the world, and probably still does. The US could not produce anything as good as Zeiss did, so with presidential approval they made an exception to the embargo against doing business with Germany, created some degree of legal separation between the Zeiss offices in the US and the German parent company, and essentially let Zeiss make lenses and prisms for both sides.



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