And these are the types of jobs that provided a decent living wage for the middle/lower-middle class, of which a lot of people in the midwest and rustbelt use to do, and the loss of such jobs has decimated these communities. Service sector, warehouse fulfillment, and gig economy jobs don't provide nearly the value, nor do they provide the types of benefits that former jobs did.

Edit - Not sure why my comment is being downvoted. A lot of the jobs in the midwest were things like basic factory work of plastic products, textiles, CNC machining, molding (of which my dad was previously employed doing), and other things of that nature which have been outsourced over the decades. These jobs not only provided a stable livable wage, but most of them also provided benefits such as health/dental insurance for not only the workers but their entire families. These jobs have left over the years, and nothing which provided the same standards of living has come into replace them. States such as michigan, illinois, ohio, wisconsin, and others in that area have been hit hard over the past few decades because of these changes in the global economy.

War requires a lot of basic manufacturing capacity, and geopolitically those aren't good things to lose.

A lot (if not most) of military machinery is still manufactured in the US. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman build our planes. General Dynamics, Oshkosh, and others build our tanks. Raytheon makes some of our missiles. In fact, here's full list of who's building our defense tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_defense_... -- As you can see, it's mostly home-grown and home-based American companies. We've done a very good job of keeping our most critical and sensitive manufacturing jobs inside the states.

It's mostly consumer goods manufacturing that's moved abroad. I don't see any particular benefit in bringing it back stateside. Making things in low-wage countries like Vietnam or China dramatically slashes costs for the consumers, allowing us American consumers to live a more lavish lifestyle. Forcing consumer goods to be manufactured in the U.S. would dramatically drive up their prices, and in effect be an indirect tax on the American consumer. Moreover, the U.S. is nearly at full employment. Who's going to staff the factories that will make consumer goods? With the extreme hostility to immigration we have under the folks in charge now, I don't see any new immigrants being let in to work at these new factories. Companies would be forced to build fully automated factories (due to labor shortage), and there'll be jarring period of high consumer goods prices while software engineers write code for new robotic/automated manufacturing of basic goods. Maybe in the end, this newly written software will (with its development cost amortized over time) allow us to undercut the prices of even low-wage human-requiring manufacturing and become a reigning manufacturer of all sorts of things -- but that benefit feels fairly remote, far-fetched, and hard-to-achieve.

I understand someone struggling who needs to buy the no name soup made in China but your 1,000 dollar cell phone only costs 250 to make. If the price went up to 400 your phone would still be a 1,000. That's what people will pay for it. If people cannot afford more the price will stay the same or go lower until Apple can't make a profit.

The jobs and spinoff businesses and increased security better environmental conditions worldwide vs Apple adding more money into a bank account. Cellphones are a bad example.

I'm aware of this, but I'd assume that they're all setup for peacetime manufacturing rates and would have difficulty scaling up. My concern is more about a lack of slack manufacturing capacity (and skills!) that could be repurposed in wartime.

IIRC, the US's slack manufacturing capacity was one of main things that won the war for the allies in WWII.

> It's mostly consumer goods manufacturing that's moved abroad. I don't see any particular benefit in bringing it back stateside.

That's true for some things, but not others. I'm thinking specifically about consumer electronics and some related areas. Where the capacity could be redirected towards military products (e.g. electronics for smart bombs and drones).

Even more broadly, consumer manufacturing may carry with it supply chains that are more militarily useful to have than the consumer product manufacturing capacity itself.

> Making things in low-wage countries like Vietnam or China dramatically slashes costs for the consumers, allowing us American consumers to live a more lavish lifestyle.

I think we've been letting this consideration drive too much of our decision making. It's one factor, but not the only one that matters.

Also, you have to think about the day when Vietnam or China runs out of people who are willing to work cheaply enough feed a system of labor arbitrage.

Look at groups of people at a more granular level. On average, the economy is more efficient when goods are manufactured overseas.

If you're living in Wisconsin and you aren't a highly skilled knowledge worker with a college degree, and have been watching your community go from people with good factory jobs to minimum wage fast food and Walmart employees, it's a disaster.

The middle of the country needs quality jobs and options. It's not enough for small groups of people to do extraordinarily well while everyone else falls by the wayside.

And people don't want government handouts to fill the void. They want dignity, purpose, and control over their lives. In America, the only way to have that is to have a reasonably well paying job.

People who have given up and are not looking for work, but instead (for example) move back in with their parents and live a lower quality of life -- not counted in employment figures.

Also these numbers don't take into account underemployment. If you got a 30 hour a week job that pays a quarter of what your old job paid, you're still considered "employed", even though your financial situation is much worse. Ditto for if, to make ends meet, you now have to work three jobs, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Yes, those people are "employed", but might be much better off if there were mid- and low-skill manufacturing jobs that have often been the staple of the middle class and working class.

Nations with all the manufacturing and farming they need to survive regardless may not feel so restrained. And countries can always form self-sufficient blocs.

But yeah, really good for American workers so we can buy more shitty products which we can throw into the landfill...

but, for whatever it's worth, the average US growth rate for advanced technology product exports was higher before Jan 1 1994 (NAFTA) than it was afterwards up until most recent data, 2018. i didn't look at imports, but suspect that the rate of import is higher/increasing. there are various interpretations of that, one of which could be that global demand for high tech stuff is simply slowing outside the US, but that seems unlikely given how much tech is blowing up generally.

another one of which that seems solid is that manufacturing "body of knowledge" / infrastructure probably allows tooling up the workforce and chipping away at high tech sort of stuff that the US may have had a dominant position in.

Alternatively, we leapfrog a generation of manufacturing processes and go straight to high speed 3D printing and clothing made from recovered landfill materials by nanobots.

I don't know if what we need is more protection or faster innovation. The two tend to work in opposite directions. Certainly they require different training and expectations.