I think there is, but it would screw over large capital owners and would be practically impossible in the US political system. The policies I believe could too it are also too radical to realistically be implemented in Europe.

We know that massive investment in early education with tutoring etc. could easily give the average US child the equivalent of today's top 2% level academic performance. This would be expensive, but essentially unproblematic it will never happen. Similarly, university education could be made publicly funded, and also cheaper. Here in Sweden it's cheaper per head than highschool education.

We know that physician labour in the US cost more than it should due to a shortage due to too few residencies. It could be solved tomorrow, and all US medical system problems could be solved over 15-20 years.

You could ensure that there's investment capital and no inflation, sidestepping the simultaneous inflation and need for investment caused by supply shocks due to war and technology change, by making everybody save a certain inflation-dependent fraction of their income from wages.

When a company is doing weird legal stuff to prevent their competitor from opening a warehouse in a certain, crush them-- impose criminal penalties, throw the planners and everyone who knew about the idea in jail.

15 years of this and you'd be in another world, one in which China might not be such a competitor after all. The only reason you aren't moving towards this world is because 'you' in the sense of the donors and the political leadership don't want to do it. There's even people who don't want publicly funded school lunches. With this attitude one makes oneself irrelevant.

I have no idea what any of your comment has to do with manufacturing infrastructure

Manufacturing today is industrial automation, mechanical engineering, etc.

If you want to build it you need capital and a large mass of competent people. China has 4x your population, so if you are to do that match them in the number of people who can come up with a concept for a factory and implement it.

You have no chance without transforming your society. You can't match them and have all this inefficient industry with middle-men and insurance companies, local hospital monopolies, local food monopolies, etc. If you are to have any chance all of that has to go away. You can't have people doing things that don't matter, you have to educate everyone you have, from the earliest education to the later stages to get them to a much higher level of capability than they are at today. You can't waste people on being hungry or not having a tutor.

If you are wasting people on being hungry, not having a tutor, in inefficient middle-men industries, etc. the China will simply steamroll you by being as many as you and us Europeans together even after a population halving and by maintaining their current competence level.

Sure there is, it's just a real monkey's paw.

It would have to be deeply painful and it would take decades. Voters would never tolerate it.

But that's assuming there's even a theoretical way to do it, which there isn't. We just don't have the natural resources or the political structure.

Not proven - america can engage in selected manufacturing esp if profit isn't the main tool of measurement.

Also keep in mind then ... China can't be cheap labor forever either ... either it will regress or we're all be buying from Africa which is the last place there's lower cost labor at scale.

In other words it's a double edge sword for China.

China can have cheap labor forever because they're an authoritarian government that runs "re-education camps" with enormous numbers of people in them.

Uh huh -- eventually even the Chinese won't put up with that in the long term. If however the Chinese gov run things like Russia or NK, for example, I'd reduce TTL by 50%. When fundamental problems persist overly long it goes from problem to distortion to corruption then purifies then explodes out when least expected. Here in the US we're going through a light case of that. Somehow the things Congress is supposed to handle has come out of the morass as President Trump.

Your faith that slavery and authoritarianism can be (and will be) overthrown by citizens is not based on reality.

For the vast majority of human history, most societies were slaveholding monarchies. There's very little incentive for Chinese people to organize when the slaves are "criminals" or Uyghur minorities.