I want to talk to you for a few minutes about so-called “free trade”. I just spent the last hour or two perusing opinions from the “experts” on free trade and what would happen if we cut off trade with China.
In short, they said the shelves at Wal-Mart, Macy’s, etc. would be empty. You know what? GOOD. The entire problem with the United States today is everyone wants cheap shit. Everyone wants the highest quality, but they don’t want to pay anything for it.
As a basic example, let’s talk about a leather belt or wallet — yeah, you can buy one made in china (the street-shitters) for about $4.00 US dollars in Wal-Mart. It might last you a year…if you’re lucky. They’re made out of shitty materials (“pleather”…i.e. PLASTIC made to APPEAR like actual leather) and they’re assembled in sweat-shops by extremely unskilled workers so the actual quality of construction is shitty as well. When your belt wears out in a few months, you cheap sons of bitches just waddle your happy, fat asses back to Wal-Mart and pay another $4 for another piece-of-shit belt imported from china.
Now…if you were to buy a hand-made belt from a leather craftsman such as myself, you’d be getting 100% US-sourced leather from the best tanneries in the United States (not that urine-tanned garbage from mexico) and it would be stitched together by an actual craftsman/artisan that takes PRIDE in their work and that is highly-skilled in that work. Yes, cheap-ass, this belt I build you is going to cost you about $150 or so, depending on if it’s hand-stitched or machine-stitched, but you know what? You won’t need to replace it because it will damn near outlast your lifetime if you care for it properly. Amortize that out across your lifetime and you’re paying about $2.72 per year (assuming you use it for around 55 years…having bought it in your 20’s or so…)…it ends up being HALF THE COST of replacing that damn chinese piece of shit belt you keep buying at Wal-Mart every few months!!!
This is why I get angry at these assholes talking about how we shouldn’t end free trade with china. We absolutely SHOULD end free trade with those assholes. They are manipulating our currency…that is how they’re getting ahead. You ever see something on ebay that ships from china and costs $1.00 with free shipping? It’s because ONE of OUR dollars buys about a HUNDRED of their worthless, inflated ones!!! That’s how that works. Yeah, it only “costs” you a dollar…but they’re profiting hand-over-fist with that AMERICAN dollar you gave them for whatever shitty little piece of shit trinket you bought on ebay. That’s how they’re getting over on us.
So then these “experts” were trying to say that china would retaliate by shutting off imports from the US for things like aircraft, spacecraft (WTF?? REALLY??? Like anyone gives a shit about china buying spacecraft…they shit on their streets for fuck’s sake…they’re a bunch of fucking pigs…), cars, machinery, etc. You know what? GOOD. When they start buying those things from places like…oh…I don’t know….say…RUSSIA…you know…because they’re so good at building things like that…when they start buying that stuff from a third-world country like Russia and their planes start falling out of the sky and their spacecraft blow up on the launchpad…and their cars fall apart within a year of purchase, then we’ll see how long they cut off imports from the USA.
I’m getting really sick and tired of having to educate my potential customers on why they should spend a little more money buying products from me…an actual person with morals, ethics, exceptional standards, and the highest integrity…over some cheap wal-mart piece of shit, imported from china. I should not be having to have this conversation with you. Your parents should have taught you the value of a finely-crafted product over some mass-produced trash. And if your parents were incapable of getting that point through your thick heads, then certainly your high school economics teacher should have taught you that.
In any case, buy from me…or don’t. I really don’t care. There are still a lot of people left that understand the value of buying an extremely well-made product made by an extremely skilled craftsman with the best materials in the world versus some chinese bullshit. As long as those (growing fewer) people still exist, I will still make and sell my leather goods and wallet chains. But I’m done trying to explain to you why and how much better the items I make are compared to the chinese crap. You either “get it” or you don’t and no amount of my explaining it to you further is going to make you understand it if you don’t already.
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