America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

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.

this is what i've been saying - critical manufacturing should of course be brought on shore but I don't understand the idea of bringing back "the assembly of hyper niche part that country Y can produce extremely cheaply but America can't even reasonably produce in quality" to American shores.

It literally harms industry because anyone relying on that hyper niche part now has to pay more (because American mfg, let's face it - is not efficient) and deal with subpar quality as opposed to higher quality foreign parts.

I hate it say it, but come on man - people aren't buying American cars globally because the Japanese and even Germans can do it better. That's free market economics, either get better at making cars or focus on making things that we can do better like iPhones and Macbooks - not try to artificially defend an industry we suck at by forcing people to deal with shittier subpar products.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable, I don't know.