[jolux]

I don't quite follow the question you're asking, but the argument I was making is one about economies of scale. Manufacturing small quantities of expensive products is comparatively easy, at the extreme end you could have a single craftsman building every phone and selling them for $5000 each. If you need to manufacture a million phones though, you're going to need more than one guy, and the facility is going to be radically different as well. The reason phones aren't manufactured in the US is not because nobody in the US knows how to make a single phone or even thousands of them, it's because factories like Foxconn which employ over a million people to churn out millions of phones and other products just do not exist, and there might not even be enough excess labor capacity to build them.

[CivBase]

I must have misunderstood your point. I thought you were arguing that manufacturers who produces a variety of products with plants in the US and Taiwan can only afford to make their expensive products in the US because only those products have the margins to offset the relatively high US labor costs.

But from your response (and on re-reading your original post) it sounds like you're actually pointing out that high-volume manufacturers with thin margins have more trouble justifying high US labor costs - in contrast to low-volume manufacturers with high margins.