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The manufacturing base in the US is quickly eroding. Seems like most everything is manufactured in the far east. |
Most consumer electronics products are manufactured in the far east, as systems (whereas, for example, lots of the computer chips that go into them are manufactured in the US as well as being designed here). The reason for this is simple. Companies in Asia outcompeted companies in the US by providing a better quality to price ratio. They do a better job at it.
This is, of course, quite a good thing for people in the US. International trade is beneficial due to specialization - each country does primarily what it is good at, producing more products that it can use in those areas of advantage. Each country then sells those surplus goods to the rest of the world at a nice profit. Specialization does the same thing for countries as it does for individuals.
The US, for example, is an information economy. If you look at DVD players, the US is a leading producer of software and design-intensive products (such as decoder chips). Many DVD players are made by taking a US central processor and software stack, putting it together with some US DACs, Korean memory chips, a Korean or Japanese disc drive, and various other international parts, then the overall system and "box design" is done by a Korean or Japanese company, who also does the quality assurance. The actual assembly of the completed product might be done in China.
Everyone does what they're good at and everyone benefits. As an engineer working at a leading US manufacturer of DVD decoder chips, I certainly have no complaints about people not buying players which were physically assemled in the US. Players assembled in China are cheaper, meaning they can be bought by more people, meaning that more decoder chips will be sold, meaning that my (American as it happens) company makes more money. And so do the American Hollywood studios who get to sell more DVDs to a larger DVD market. And the discs are where the real money is in this industry.
Of course, I also have no problem in general with buying things in general from Asian companies. If they can make a better product they've earned it. And if I was going to spend money on charity rather than on quality products, I would choose (for example) the very hard working but fairly poor Chinese engineers, over their much better paid American equivalents.