Another possible solution is to force China
to let its currency rise in value. A third solution is to prevent
incorporated businesses from setting up manufacturing overseas, which is
fundamentally immoral.

But is it ? Surely, it's equally immoral for any country to try to dictate
to its indiginous companies, how they should construct their business
model
in order to turn a profit ? And if you are then going to be fair about it,
do you stop all of the foreign companies that set up and invest in the US
or
the UK to avoid import restrictions or whatever, from doing so ? Would
there
be anybody in the US ready and waiting to take up the slack in lost jobs,
that would result ? Setting aside the 'exploitation' arguments that
immediately get thrown into the arena when you start talking foreign
manufacturing, are American and European companies doing a bad thing by
investing in those 'third world' countries, and would the inhabitants be
better off, if the manufacturing companies were not there giving them work
?

It is fundamentally immoral, based on the assumptions underlying the
creation of limited-liability corporations. I'll explain it, if you want.


One of the arguments in favor of "free" trade is that each country will
specialize in whatever it does best. Baloney. All human beings are
equally
intelligent and capable. As the Chinese realize that Japan's success was
not due to lower prices as much as it was to consistent high quality,
they
will produce products that further destroy manufacturing in Western
countries.
Just wait until they start manufacturing high-quality cars that sell for
$4000.

I'm not too sure about that one. Setting globalisation of manufacturing
aside for a minute, I think that there is still a large degree of
specialisation attached to various countries around the world, albeit with
somewhat fuzzier edges than was the case a couple of decades back. I'm not
at all sure that I agree with you with regard to the Japanese success
story.
I think maybe you have a short memory, or possibly, Europe saw more
Japanese
manufacturing output, than the US did, in the early days. Here, most
Japanese imported stuff was known as "Jap Crap", and was especially known
for being plastic and 'cheap and nasty'. Their cars were well known for
just
rotting away into rust buckets, almost before they needed their first
roadworthiness test at 3 years old. "Consistent high quality" is the last
description that most people would have used. It was only as they learnt
their lessons, that the quality improved, to the point where it overtook
western manufactured goods, probably around the early to late 70s, when
they
really started global marketing of highly targeted consumer goods like TV
sets, VCRs, motorcycles, cars and so on. The Koreans already manufacture
pretty reasonable cars at very cheap prices. A few visits back, I hired a
car on-airport in the US, and it was a Korean KIA Sedona. I drove it
around
for two weeks and, although it was not the 'smartest' car on the block,
with
the most features or top notch finish, it was never-the-less perfectly
adequate and comfortable, and did exactly what it said on the can.
Certainly
no worse than some bottom end Fords that I have driven.

As Marty McFly said to Doc Brown... "Gee, Doc, all the best stuff comes from
Japan."

I didn't say that Japanese products are all good, or have always been good.

The Japanese made good photo equipment not long after WWII. (There was a
recent Popular Photography article about this. Nikon and Canon weren't
successful merely because their cameras and lenses cost less.) And though
there was plenty of "Jap crap" in the early '50s, the mid-'50s saw the rise
of the Japanese consumer-electronics business, which gradually overwhelmed
the American (partly with Richard Nixon's help).

One reason for Japanese success was their recognition that they were
fundamentally an exporting nation. They therefore paid attention not only to
quality, but to reliability. This is the reason Japanese electronics tend to
break down less often than American or European. (American products,
regardless of their cost, seem to have problems with poor solder joints.)

The famous statistician W. Edwards Deming famously said that "You cannot
_inspect_ quality into a product." That is, you can't discard the bad
samples and expect the remainder to be of high quality. The quality and
reliability of anything depend on its basic design, and how well it's
manufactured. American companies learned this too late. (See the Wikipedia
article.)


It is possible to imagine an inverted world in which the "third-world"
countries do most of the manufacturing, while the "first-world" and
"second-world" countries produce most of the food. (Notice I said
"imagine".)

And that would be bad because ... ?

It wouldn't necessarily be bad, but it would be weird.