[quote=The Imagination]
I got some stuff made from China. Why don't we make more of our own stuff, we'd probably have more jobs available.
[/quote]

You can thank Chinese and American businesses for that, the cost of labor was always a factor in the West with unions, equal rights, and such, you couldn't do the things that happened in other nations. With the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960/70s, the United States began to woo the Communist Chinese, in order to take a vital ally away from the Soviet Union, meaning it would be just the Warsaw Pact, not Warsaw Pact and Friends, engaged in any large scale conflict with NATO.

As the United States and the West in general began to rapidity expand and industrialize moreso than even during the Second World War, the need for goods was much higher than the supply could manage, industry began to look for a much cheaper solution to produce their goods, enter the just now developing Chinese nation. With hordes of cheap labor, shaky and politicians so corrupt they make US politics blush, began to allow massive US industries to move into China, hiring workers for inhumane amounts of hours, in horrid working environments, criminally low pay, so on,

What happened was a massive increase in provided goods and a massive drop in cost of manpower. Profit goes though the roof, China enters an age of crazy prosperity, consumers in the west are satisfied.