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The first time I ever saw Chinese "consumer goods" was a display in a Zurich department store in 1980. At the time, the US sensibly excluded imports from hostile Communist countries who paid workers slave wages. The products amounted to crude iron anvils, pipe wrenches, and the like. Over the decades, fat cat US industrialists, anxious to avoid paying a living wage to US factory workers, got the exclusion eliminated and started economic co-operation with the Reds that has hurt the American standard of living and the middle class way of life in huge ways. US companies buckled to Chinese companies because they understood that US intellectual property law is mainly toothless to practically deal with foreign infringers except for the deepest of pockets, they ceased US manufacture of such things as rotisserie ovens and lava lights, and took pennies on the dollar from the Chinese manufacturers. Now all those Chinese profits are building a huge military force which inevitably will be used against us.
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Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. . . Restraint in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964
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