Unmade in America

A couple of weeks ago I read this Forbes article called “Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In the USA.” I was looking for the two tired and mostly false arguments that usually get trotted out:

• Greedy American workers want outrageous things like a living wage, regular hours, decent benefits, and a safe workplace.
• We have so many onerous regulations and taxes, that it just isn’t practical to do business here except of course to suck the money out of our wallets.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that instead, the article focused on the fact that too many of the components of high-tech gadgetry aren’t available from American suppliers, therefore we can’t really put together the whole product here. It’s a problem that has gotten worse over the years as Americans have shifted from a manufacturing economy to an information economy to the Latte Economy.

So then I didn’t really know what to do when I read about a little problem over at Gibson Guitars. It seems that federal agents raided Gibson, confiscating millions of dollars worth of woods such as ebony and rosewood, instruments, and electronic records. Apparently this was done in violation of the law: “US officials have actually refused to tell Gibson what it allegedly did wrong, and why the raid was conducted. The company was never notified of any potential violations prior to the raid, and no official charges were ever filed. By all appearances, the government simply decided one day to unlawfully storm the company’s manufacturing units with loaded weapons, and is now attempting to destroy one of the last honest American manufacturers in existence.”

Such heavy handed — and potentially politically motivated — enforcement of the law could leave legitimate owners of antique instruments in deep doo-doo too.

But wait! This gets even messier! Apparently, there would be no problem with this wood having been imported if it had been finished by workers in India. So let me get this straight: the feds would rather that wood was finished by poorly paid laborers in India — possibly child laborers — than finished by highly paid craftsmen in Tennessee. And moreover, if it wasn’t legal to import this wood in the first place, how did it make it through customs in the first place? For the first time, I wonder if it is practical to make guitars in the United States.

Make no mistake. I am for reasonable regulations that protect the world’s resources and prevent tyrants/terrorists from profiting on the suffering of their people. But clearly we have highly arbitrary regulations when it comes to some products: Does finishing a piece of ebony mean anything about how it was harvested? Does finishing a diamond mean no warlords made a profit? Or does the regulation just protect the profit of the plunderer? These regulations have been handed down from both Democratic and Republican administrations — go ahead and read that link about diamonds if you don’t believe me — so it is clear that neither party has any respect for American workers. And since our economy is currently creating no jobs, that’s just despicable.

There’s clearly more to the Gibson story. So if you have information to add, please put it in comments.