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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

(www.molsonhart.com)
842 points putzdown | 2 comments | 15 Apr 25 13:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.506s | source
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vFunct ◴[15 Apr 25 14:05 UTC] No.43692883[source]▶
Our economy was designed to NOT have citizens work at factories. We pay thousands of dollars a year in our public schools to teach each of our citizens calculus, literature, world history, and physics, so that they DON'T have to work at a factory, or perform manual labor like picking strawberries or driving trucks or cleaning toilets.

Why would anyone want to go back to an economy that can be run by a third worlders? What is our competitive advantage then?

Economics works when the people do the things they are most efficient at. If a person in China can make iPhones for cheaper than an American, LET THEM. Our citizens should be designing them instead, because that's what we train our citizens to do.

Trump and the Republicans really do think of our citizens as third worlders performing manual labor like we were oxen.

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1. fullshark ◴[15 Apr 25 14:09 UTC] No.43692926[source]▶
At its root I think this is driven by anxiety over how America would perform in a hot war, rose colored glasses culturally regarding the post WW2 era, and acknowledging that there's no real economic growth opportunity in America for unskilled labor, it's merely a way to tread water now.
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2. lesbolasinc ◴[15 Apr 25 14:16 UTC] No.43693059[source]▶
going to have to give you kudos and steal that last part of "unskilled factory labour being a way to just tread water"

i didn't understand it myself until I developed a hardware system and computed the margins, hassle, etc - manual labor/assembly/mfg is not what a developed economy relies on and its asinine to pretend it is.

I don't know how the current American dynamism movement has picked up the steam it has