Wanting more, but more of goods of a low quality is the problem. Naturally, U.S. manufacturing workers know what the quality of their work product is, so they'd never want to buy that. Why they'd buy items of even lower quality is a mystery to me.

I recently learned that Sanyo TV's sold by WalMart aren't of the same quality, nor necessarily of the same characteristics as seemingly identical models sold elsewhere. They even have a slightly different model number. While WalMart's warranty applies, the Sanyo repair center won't touch 'em. Why would anyone want to buy such a thing? It offers less than a 5% savings margin.

For 30 years, the U.S. auto industry turned out worse and worse cars, yet people bought 'em, believing it to be "patriotic" to do so. So long as people bought 'em, Detroit kept shipping 'em, each year with reductions in quality.

This crazy notion that it's important to have "lotsa stuff" rather than having good stuff seems a bit silly to me.

When I was a boy, my parents bought new furniture for their living room. They appreciated good quality, hence, each of the living room chairs they purchased cost more than their then-new house. The coffee table, a custom-built Danish handmade piece cost nearly twice what each chair cost. Their attitude was that it made no sense to have a million dollar safe with only a hundred dollars in it. The only U.S.-made pieces they bought were two end-tables, each of quality comparable with those Danish-made chairs. Things have changed since then. Now, if you had multiple billions of $US available, you still couldn't get a top-quality piece of furniture, or anything else, built by an American production worker, not because they can't, but because they won't.

Yes, it probably is greed, but not on the part of the manufacturer. It's the unreasonable expectations of the labor force. Many of these workers think that by dropping out of school and going to work in "the mill" or "the mine" they'll earn more. The figure that they'll work for a couple of years, by the end of which they'll be running the company and will be able to retire. I wish 'em luck!

RE