I can remember products that sold cheaply and looked like the real thing. They performed as they were supposed to and had a “Made in the U.S.A.” label on them. I checked through most of my electronic toys and found they were made in China. Taiwan USED to be the place of origin of my tools. I had a great many roughly made ones that worked well in my long gone workshop.  Now, I have a Japanese drill left over that I could not part with. It looks incongruous and sophisticated next to the simplistic sander (made in China) that I also kept.  But, my latest acquisition from that overpopulated land is an exercise stationary bicycle that now sits by the window on our balcony. My doctor and everyone else said I should give up cycling outside.

Do you recall when the Chinese under Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward had millions producing little backyard steel making furnaces? They are no more but the Chinese are now leading the world in under pricing most goods and are leaping forward in the technology field also.

The Chinese are leading in turning out consumer goods for the rest of the world partly because they have such a huge population.  Idle hands make trouble and we remember when those hands were manipulating guns and ammunition in a Police Action called the Korean War. We used to boast about our American KNOW-HOW and the rest of the world looked on with envy. Those times have morphed into Americans being unwilling to do the work that immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive here in droves eager to take on.  I think our people all want to make easy money and are now being urged to play the stock market to drive up savings for their futures.  We all have pipe dreams and this recalls the opium dens the Chinese and other Asiatic peoples used to frequent to forget their troubles.

Have American hands forgotten their skills?  I do not think so.  What I think is that the huge population and limited resources of present day China are driving them to succeed when Americans feel they no longer have to work and are entitled to become Capitalists.  It is ironic that the Communist State of the People’s Republic of China is competing successfully with American Capitalism and is learning very fast how to become the Americans were who once led the way for the last two centuries. China and other nations have caught up to the exemplar.

My relatively cheap exercise bike has nice little touches that more expensive bikes have. Clever Chinese hands have filled the empty space Americans have given up. I think we can blame ourselves for losing the respect of the rest of the world for losing the Know-How for which Americans were once famous.