Scott Paton’s "The Chinese are Coming! The Chinese are Coming!" (Quality Digest, February 2005) describes how China’s Chery Automobile Co. plans to undercut American automakers’ prices by up to 30 percent. The article professes that neither tariffs nor layoffs are the solution to the hemorrhage of American manufacturing jobs.Outsourcing jobs to China for cheap labor is, in fact, almost always prima facie evidence of managerial incompetence—usually among executives who are trained in finance or marketing as opposed to actually making things. The United States developed an answer to cheap offshore labor a century ago. Henry Towne, a past president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), wrote this foreword to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Shop Management (1903):

“We are justly proud of the high wage rates which prevail throughout our country, and jealous of any interference with them by the products of the cheaper labor of other countries. To maintain this condition… we should welcome and encourage every influence tending to increase the efficiency of our productive processes.”

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