Alfred Holzheu – online and verbose – The Main Pontifications page

Chinese friends? and a comment on Solyndra

Sep 2, 2011 at 9:15 PM

Alfred Holzheu

"I wrote this in reply to a reply (who did not see the problem) to a friend who was bemoaning the moving of a division of GE to China, but I feel that it is relevant here also. Also, the competitors to Solyndra who drove down the cost of panels to below manufactuerablitly in the US, were receiving massive direct and indirect subsidies (the artificially low value of the yuan and the use of essentially sweat shop labor) from the Chinese government, and if we used the Chinese system of "equalizing" tariffs to discourage our products from being competitive in China, we could take those same tariffs and "subsidize" our manufacturer’s to make our investment worthwhile.

The problem is that by moving that division to China, although there is a temporary business increase for some US companies, we are sharing our tech with the "economic" enemy. They will copy everything, and then use slave and gulag labor to produce these parts they need to have and cheaper and sell to the rest of the world. Do you realize that there is no Paypal in China (they did not allow it or put horrendous conditions or duties to discourage it) and Cisco has to constantly fight to keep their proprietary code (and have lost every time to the lack of real enforcement of intellectual property rights in China). Look at Apple, Foxcom (Apple’s primary manufacturer in China) is now introducing their own cell phone (with a proprietary OS) that they will sell in competition to Apple all over the world and they only way they know how to do that is that they were taught by us. Are we that stupid? Where are we going to employee people if we constantly put all our manufacturers out of business? They are not our friends.

Alfred

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