Back in the early-1970's I was a member of a team that built socket head cap screw manufacturing machines for NASA and the USAF. They were sold to American screw manufacturers (for about $0.15 per $15,000 invested). Bar stock was loaded in at one end and finished, inspected, counted, and bagged screws came out the other end (rejects going into a waste bin) at a rate of 1.5 million fasteners per week. The only "labor" involved was: (1) loading bar stock at the infeed (automated at taxpayer expense several years later); (2) replacing work tools (which was less than four hours/month of operation based on 3 shifts/day); (3) adjusting shank length values (automated at taxpayer expense several years later); and emptying the outfeed and waste bins. The first of these units shipped overseas were sent out in the mid-1980's (I don't remember the exact year) to Korea. Later units were shipped overseas to India, Indonesia, and China. The last unit was shipped out to China in January of 2004. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times (and other "business journals") all had long articles proclaiming that it was the cost of labor forcing that change.
Back in the mid-1970's I was in college where we had a (taxpayer funded) vehicle research institute. We developed the stratified charge combustion chamber. We developed optimized fuel metering (carburetor and injector) technology and devices. They were sold to "major American automakers" (for about $0.10 per $50,000 invested) who sat on them for more than a decade while the Japanese brought them to market and leapfrogged those same "major American automakers."
Back in the late-1970's there was a group (my involvement was minor) that redesigned and rebuilt American steel mills to bring them up to both production capacity and environmental emission requirements. This effort was funded through the Department of Commerce and the EPA. Within three years of being completed, once-American steel companies were moving these newly rebuilt smelters and rolling mills to Korea, Indonesia, and China -- and being given tax credits for doing so.
This past February, the medical business press was all agog with praise for a new device that offered a (potentially safer) alternative to angioplasty -- the RotoBlator. The articles praised the entrepreneurial spirit that brought this about. Funny, I did most of the original mechanical system design and prototyping for this product back when it was a Department of Health funded R&D program at the University of Washington's College of Medicine in the mid-1980's. Funny, I did most of the tooling for this product when it was being authorized for experimental development testing as it was being commercialized under DoH and FDA auspices in the early-to-late-1990's. To the best of my (limited) knowledge, no private funding was used on this project until it already had preliminary FDA approval as a medical device.
Where are the complaints about socialism in these cases? FYI: The American taxpayers have subsidized Boeing's 787 to the tune of $43 billion according to my summary. Is someone going to complain about socialism there?
