How much does a guitar's country of origin matter?

[Larry Mal]

Nah, it wasn't you. You didn't do anything wrong.

[DesmondWafers]

This thread is getting me all nostalgic and teary eyed over the ol' buckwalder days. I know we all miss ripping on the libruls.

[Ceylon]

Sorry guys I didnt mean to start an argument! Really was just curious the difference in quality between countries!

It's absolutely a fair question to ask. It just very quickly stops being about the quality of guitars as objects in themselves, and that is fair also. I just made the observation that the trajectory is always pretty much the same. I followed a Swedish music forum for a bunch of years and the same thing would happen every year or so, except there it got way more personal

What it does all come down to, every time, is that surely a great guitar can be built anywhere in the world by anyone, for cheap, regardless of where it was designed, but that perhaps it shouldn't be.

[sookwinder]

Just a question for every one to consider ... you don't need to reply:

(Blue) Jeans are a USA historical piece of clothing that was then eventually accepted throughout the rest of the world.

Where are the jeans that you are currently wearing manufactured?

[Larry Mal]

I will reply, though:

I haven't worn any kind of jeans in over fifteen years. Where were they made then? I dunno.

Again, though, you have to understand: I am aware that the ship has sailed on a lot of things, and that I will never see domestic production of some things back here. In some cases I don't care, in some cases I do, in some cases it's a good thing, in some cases it's not.

Some years ago I read about the people of Cambodia attempting to get a Hanes factory. At the time, I thought, great. Cambodia is certainly a nation that has suffered and could really use some outside investment. Sure, they'll have to work cheap, and be exploited to a degree, but they are basically undergoing an industrial revolution at this point and industrial revolutions are terrible things to go through, even in the US and the UK they were.

And this one is terrible, indeed.

Now, you might be expecting me to say, we shouldn't support that! Production of those things should be moved back to the States!

But no. Frankly, like I say, industrial revolutions are awful things to live through. It would be nice to apply some kind of fair labor laws internationally, but that'll only do so much, and if it ends up kicking the price of the laborers up too much then there's no benefit to employing them and corporations won't. Why move a factory to Cambodia if it's not going to be cheaper?

And then the industrial revolution doesn't come to Cambodia (bear in mind I'm talking about all this in very simplistic terms).

China is now making a move towards being a leader in product design. Trump is trying to stop this, but he can't. China went through a period of people working cheap, China was able to invest in education to a fair degree, now they want to be a nation that goes for where the money really is, in design and intellectual property. Again, very simple terms: but they had to undergo a period of being where the world's dildos were made first. Making your dildo wasn't their dream, but they did it. I hope you like it.

My point is nothing is simple.

But bear in mind that all of you that live in other nations view the United States as something, but the loss of manufacturing jobs here fucking hurts. It hurts so bad that Americans did a really stupid thing a couple years ago in an effort to change what has been happening- you might have heard about it.

Long story short, the manufacturing base in this nation went into free fall and our corporations began to view the American worker as a waste. That hurts. The overall amount of tonnage that the United States manufactures is in fact up, but it's been accompanied by flat and declining wages and total number of Americans employed.

In other words, they are just paying us less, and making us work harder than ever before. We are stepping backwards. For fuck's sake, a lot of our huge corporations don't even pay taxes anymore, and the Republicans just made it even easier for them to avoid even more of it. Our tax base is collapsing, so how would we invest in ourselves?

Health care, home ownership, education and everything else is drifting away from us. We are regressing as a nation. For the first time ever, Americans are not as wealthy as their parents.

So when you sit there and tell me it doesn't matter where my Stratocaster is made, where my jeans are made, you don't know what you are talking about as far as what the loss of our manufacturing jobs matters. It does matter. It matters a lot.

Now, I'm no fool, and I know that simply wanting manufacturing coming back here is pretty stupid, because the fact is, Americans cost a lot to employ and if Apple computers came back here (for instance) then they would cost even more, fewer people could buy them, they would produce less, and there would be need for fewer workers. You can't simply go against the grain of what the world is. Trump is a fucking moron.

But, we should be investing in our citizens to prepare them for the changes in the world, but we aren't doing that, either. That's a long story for another thread.

Still, when I look at an Indonesian made Stratocaster, or Cambodian made shoes, I can't help but be reminded of how betrayed American workers truly have been, by the corporations that found us irrelevant and a burden and the government that only works for those corporations, and not us.

[Maggieo]

I once bought a guitar from Canada. Now it's smooooookkkkin'!

[Larry Mal]

I once bought a guitar from Canada. Now it's smooooookkkkin'!

Canada is part of NAFTA, though. Our neighbors. A strong and rich Canada and Mexico is a strong and rich United States.

[sookwinder]

Given there is free trade between Canada and the US ... does it also apply to marijuana?

[Meme Library]

This thread is getting me all nostalgic and teary eyed over the ol' buckwalder days. I know we all miss ripping on the libruls.

Who's buckwalder?

[mackerelmint]

Canada is part of NAFTA, though. Our neighbors. A strong and rich Canada and Mexico is a strong and rich United States.

I'll bite. How do you reconcile supporting NAFTA with how easy it's made it to move jobs to Mexican maquilas, like Carrier did recently?

And now I'll ramble in economic terms, as is my wont. NAFTA is great for consumers, all trade deals basically are. There's a tradeoff, though. We get ahead on paper, because goods end up costing less. This is generally accepted although it's hard to show on paper when the gains are often in terms of prices not rising for a while, or at the rate they otherwise would, rather than a case of us entering a trade deal and seeing prices fall. Though that does happen as well. The tradeoff is in our own manufacturing sector and the jobs lost, as well as some dead weight loss which is usually not a lot.

So when those jobs go, we lose purchasing power, but collectively reduce the purchasing power needed even more than what we lose. On paper it pencils out in our favor, if you look at these deals one at a time. Eventually, though, you run out of jobs that require specialization that makes those workers who have those labor skills, and the jobs are replaced with lower wage, unskilled jobs in services. Eventually it catches up with us. Germany, for example, has protected its skilled labor sector and it's been a real strength for them.

Mexico's economy has always been kinda fucked. I mean, a theoretically robust economy would end up being good for us, because then Mexico imports more of our stuff. But their economy isn't great, and a significant piece of their GNP is remittances from the US, and how much stuff are we making for them to buy anyway? They're making all that stuff now. Which is part of our GNP figure, since that money comes back home. But... it goes straight to the company coffers. The economic value of that which is made possible by those wages being paid to mexicans is captured in Mexico's GDP figure, and to us it's zero.

That's all just a fancy way of saying "nothing's ever simple". It's great for consumers but bad for workers, and one often sees it overlooked that they're ultimately two ways of describing what are mostly the same group of people.

[Larry Mal]

A great American.

[DesmondWafers]

An insane far right forumite that was banned a few years ago. I don't usually see "liberal bashing" on this website (I try to stay out of the trump thread for my own sanity) and some comments earlier reminded me of him.

[mackerelmint]

my middle class bourgeoisie status

AHHHHHH I LOVE THIS. It's such a great expository tidbit. According to Marx, the middle class he was born into didn't exist. You're a lord or a serf in his world view, a proletarian or bourgeoisie. Yet now anyone in that "imaginary" middle class is basically accused by many Marxists of being part of the boureoisie, despite working for a paycheck and holding exactly none of the means of production as their own property.

Of course, Marx had a housekeeper and lived almost entirely off his buddy Fred's trust fund.

Marx is catching on again, among people who aren't old enough to remember the cold war at all, and it's a real shame. And the irony is that all these kids want is a social safety net and some opportunity. And because republicans have been decrying those very sane things as "socialism" their entire lives, they believe that that is what socialism is. They believe in a republican lie at the same time they believe the socialist lie that capitalism is monolithic and that the corporatism we live in now is in any way actual capitalism. How very sad.

So was someone saying something about metaphysical and political directions? Do I get points for going in both at the same time?

[Larry Mal]

Canada is part of NAFTA, though. Our neighbors. A strong and rich Canada and Mexico is a strong and rich United States.

I'll bite. How do you reconcile supporting NAFTA with how easy it's made it to move jobs to Mexican maquilas, like Carrier did recently?

And now I'll ramble in economic terms, as is my wont. NAFTA is great for consumers, all trade deals basically are. There's a tradeoff, though. We get ahead on paper, because goods end up costing less. This is generally accepted although it's hard to show on paper when the gains are often in terms of prices not rising for a while, or at the rate they otherwise would, rather than a case of us entering a trade deal and seeing prices fall. Though that does happen as well. The tradeoff is in our own manufacturing sector and the jobs lost, as well as some dead weight loss which is usually not a lot.

So when those jobs go, we lose purchasing power, but collectively reduce the purchasing power needed even more than what we lose. On paper it pencils out in our favor, if you look at these deals one at a time. Eventually, though, you run out of jobs that require specialization that makes those workers who have those labor skills, and the jobs are replaced with lower wage, unskilled jobs in services. Eventually it catches up with us. Germany, for example, has protected its skilled labor sector and it's been a real strength for them.

Mexico's economy has always been kinda fucked. I mean, a theoretically robust economy would end up being good for us, because then Mexico imports more of our stuff. But their economy isn't great, and a significant piece of their GNP is remittances from the US, and how much stuff are we making for them to buy anyway? They're making all that stuff now. Which is part of our GNP figure, since that money comes back home. But... it goes straight to the company coffers. The economic value of that which is made possible by those wages being paid to mexicans is captured in Mexico's GDP figure, and to us it's zero.

That's all just a fancy way of saying "nothing's ever simple". It's great for consumers but bad for workers, and one often sees it overlooked that they're ultimately two ways of describing what are mostly the same group of people.

Well, a couple of thoughts. I talked earlier about how the American worker has been abandoned by his government, who lets corporations have the upper strength. As a result, American workers, but not German ones, have to deal with a failing and increasingly unaffordable educational system and a broken, two tiered health care system, among other things. We could have gone the more German direction of a protected economy, higher taxes and investment in American workers over time. But we went a different direction.

And yeah, I'll say it caught up to us, all right.

Regarding Carrier, you say that NAFTA makes it easier to relocate factories, and I can't disagree with that, on the other hand I haven't noticed a lot of difficulty in American companies using foreign labor in non-NAFTA nations. Enriching Mexicans might be simply settling on a bad situation, but it's something.

You are correct in saying that nothing is ever simple and a lot of this is good for consumers and bad for workers. Waving a magic want tomorrow and bringing back every manufacturing job to the States would be terrible.

As far as the benefits of NAFTA and Mexico to us, I'm going to just quote something I read:

It is hard to recapture that mindset today. Now, Mexico is macroeconomically stable. It is one of the richest Latin American countries in per capita terms, and its exports per head are more than double those of Brazil. Around 25 percent of Mexico’s GDP comes from the export of manufactured goods, mostly to the United States, and the Mexican economy is vastly more open than it was a generation ago. Inflation, despite some worrying recent signs, seems securely in single digits. There is a domestic credit market that works. The education system, while not by any means wonderful, works better than it did in 1988. Also significant is the fact that the number of Mexicans with degrees from first world universities is now quite large—well into six figures. Mexican universities are also much better than they were. As a professor, I find that the academic preparation of the Mexican students that I now teach has improved immeasurably since I began my teaching career in the late 1970s. Last but by no means least, Mexico is now a democracy.

It is important not to overstate the progress that has been made. Mexico continues to have major problems with organized crime, above all connected to the illegal drugs trade, and corruption remains a serious problem within law enforcement agencies (with not only the police but also the judiciary).

Considering the amount of economic reform that has taken place, economic growth rates have been disappointing. This is mainly because the economy remains significantly controlled by oligopolies, not least the state-run petroleum company Pemex. Most important, Mexico continues to suffer from severe social problems. Anti-poverty policies, although better focused than a generation ago, still fall far short of where they need to be.

It would be impossible to separate out Mexican membership in NAFTA from the other factors driving these changes. Mexico’s exports of manufactured goods started increasing rapidly when it entered the GATT in 1986, rather than NAFTA in 1994. Democratization would probably have come about—though perhaps in a different way—without NAFTA. Mexico’s population growth, which underlay a lot of concern about that country’s long term future, was starting to slow down well before 1988. It has slowed further and faster than expected, and not only because of the numbers of people migrating northward.

Yet, one thing is clear. The US government has a very strong interest in Mexican political and economic stability. It has quite enough foreign policy problems as it is. However, Washington no longer has to fear economic collapse or institutional breakdown in Mexico. Twenty years ago, a reasonable forecast would have had to give significant weight to the possibility of something of this kind happening. NAFTA therefore seems to be having positive effects, not just in encouraging trade and investment but also in underpinning political stability and social progress in Mexico—from which many millions of US citizens also benefit. This is something that US presidential candidates might be wise to note.

The societal changes in Mexico due to NAFTA have been well worth it. Some things are more valuable than just money.

[Larry Mal]

my middle class bourgeoisie status

AHHHHHH I LOVE THIS. It's such a great expository tidbit. According to Marx, the middle class he was born into didn't exist. You're a lord or a serf in his world view, a proletarian or bourgeoisie. Yet now anyone in that "imaginary" middle class is basically accused by many Marxists of being part of the boureoisie, despite working for a paycheck and holding exactly none of the means of production as their own property.

I was attempting to be ironic.