This Noble Land by James A. Michener Page B

bonanza within their economies; the peasants continued to harvest their fields and the workmen to pursue their trades. They enjoyed a slow, orderly and controlled growth, and within a century both nations were much stronger than profligate Spain, whose flood of unearned income brought it to stagnation, if not to ruin.
    Americans should study the Spanish phenomenon—falling from supremacy down to third-rate in one century—because we are making the same errors that weakened Spain. The gold and silver mines that we have discovered are the factories in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Mexico. They make the consumer goods our once famous factories no longer bother with. Like sixteenth-century Spain, we buy the goods we want from abroad and allow our bold peasantry to languish without jobs. We are able to purchase so much from abroad because our tax system has constantly enriched our upper classes so that they can afford the foreign goods.
    Visit my street in a typical American suburb. Parked in the driveways are cars and small trucks made in Japan. In my house the sound system that plays the music I love is totally Japanese. I’ve tried other makes and they cannot be relied upon to function more than half a year; the Japanese electronics go on forever, and if replacement parts are ever required, they are available and easily installed. My closet is filled with all kinds of clothes made in East Asia at bargain prices; my shoes are from either Spain or Asia. My tennis shoes are from Taiwan, as are my caps, emblazoned with the names of professional U.S. sports teams. My electric lights are made abroad, as are my inexpensive bedroom clock radios. My little camera is foreign-made, as is the film I use. My neighbor has a wonderful video camera for making movies and, minutes later, showing them on a family screen. Both the camera and the screen came from Japan. I sometimes feel that anything I pick up in my home will bear, on scrutiny, the label MADE IN JAPAN . O r MADE IN TAIWAN , MADE IN KOREA .
    The young lady across the street who works as a librarian occupies a neat condo in which the kitchen is an international gourmet festival. There are cans of sliced mango from Thailand, hearts of palm from Brazil and ginger-sauce dressing fromCanada. She has stocked tins of jack mackerel from Chile, water chestnuts from China and jars of marinated artichoke hearts and capers from Spain.
    In heavy industry the same buy-abroad situation prevails. What used to be made in American steel factories is now made in Asia. The wood products that we used to fabricate in Oregon and Washington are now made in the woodworking factories in Asia. When I worked in Poland I was surprised to find a factory that operated overtime. When I asked what they were making, the foreman explained: ‘We found a vacuum in American industry—golf carts. Everyone uses the product but nobody in the States bothers to make them anymore. We ship them by the thousands.’
    Walter Cronkite and I met the workers who were building him a sailboat—in Taiwan. Wherever I went in Asia it seemed that some enterprising entrepreneur was building things for shipment to the States. Most curious was an entire village in China whose talented masons were carving panels in stone for the decoration of expensive American hotels.
    This constant flight of American industry to foreign sites was very apparent to me when I lived in Alaska. In my small town, a village set among forests, the principal industry was a thriving Japanese mill in which recently felled trees were ground into a liquid pulp. Then, right into the middle of town via the small river that ran through it, came huge ships from Japan and Korea, which siphoned the pulp into their holds and ferried it back across the Pacific. There it was transformed into high-quality specialty paper, which in turn was brought back for sale in the United States.
    I witnessed the same phenomenon with the ore mines in Alaska and