A completely ‘service economy’ will not work for long.
In order to stay viable and growing, manufacturing must be first and foremost the bedrock of any economy that will ever hope to last.
You cannot build a strong nation on nail salons, fast food and entertainment venues........
Fundamentally the only sources of wealth are to
• Extract it - fishing, forestry, mining and drilling
• Grow it - farming
• Manufacture it - from resources extracted or grown
• Transport it - from where it is to where it is needed
Taking in each others laundry (also known as a service economy) doesn’t create wealth, it just spreads it thinner and thinner until it is all gone.
Junk economics.
Hong Kong has a strong economy, and for most of its modern history, has always had one, yet it manufactures nothing and has no wealth of natural resources either. Hong Kong is a strong economy because it concentrates on what it does best and what the rest of the world (i.e., Hong Kong's customers) finds most valuable: it provides SERVICES to the global economy, and in return, it receives manufactured goods, agricultural goods, etc. "Manufacturing" is not at all necessary for a viable, growing economy; FREEDOM of trade and division of labor are important.
It also follows that if a country manufactures everything it needs on its own, even if it has a great wealth of natural resources, it won't be a strong, viable, growing economy. In fact, it will be a weak economy. The economist Henry George made the following argument in the 19th century, the logic of which is still relevant (and, I believe, still unanswerable) today:
One of the ways a country effectively subdues another country during wartime is by imposing an economic blockade, thus forcing the blockaded country to rely economically completely on itself: trade with other countries is forcibly prevented, so the blockaded country must manufacture everything on its own. No military strategist would think this was a way of strengthening the blockaded country! By forcing the blockaded country to rely completely on its own resources, you obviously weaken it. That's why blockades are imposed. That's why they work.
And yet, certain conservatives (Trump, et al.) believe that if a country such as the US imposed a blockade on itself by implementing economic policies forcing it to manufacture things it could simply trade for much more cheaply, it would somehow have the opposite effect of a military blockade, and would magically strengthen the economy! Obviously, whether a blockade is imposed from the outside by an a enemy nation, or from the inside by one's own government policies, the result will be the same: the blockaded nation will waste its resources, its land, and its labor, trying to be completely self-sufficient, by having to manufacture everything domestically. Under conditions of liberty and free trade, countries do the same thing as individual people: they concentrate their efforts on whatever they do best, and whatever their customers estimate to be of the highest economic value. Then they trade, value for value.
In the case of the US and the rest of the world, what we do best — in other words, what our customers, the global economy estimate to be the contribution with the highest value — are services like electronic component design (not manufacture, but design); computer and smartphone design (not manufacture, but design), software (a service, not a manufactured object), and of course, banking, finance, and insurance. Those services add the most value to various final products, the manufacture and assembly of which are more efficiently done by others, elsewhere.
Finally, a common flawed assumption of much junk economics is that a service is either not a true economic good, or is somehow "less valuable" than a physical good. Thus, according to this view, the service of providing a haircut is less valuable to an economy than the physical manufacture of the scissors. This is utterly untrue and reflects nothing but a materialistic bias on the part of those who make the claim. In fact, "value" in an economy is subjective and in the eye of the beholder — ultimately, the consumer. If consumers are willing to pay a higher price for the service of a haircut than they are for a physical pair of scissors, then by definition the haircut service adds more value to the economy than the manufacture of the physical scissors. That scissors are necessary for providing a haircut is true but irrelevant to the argument.
You might think of it this way: brain surgery is a service; scalpels are physically manufactured objects. Which adds more value to an economy? True, the surgical service requires the physical scalpels, but the scalpels take on a greatly added value in the hands of the skilled surgeon. Same can be said for the scissors and the barber. And the entrepreneurial manufacturer and his banker or financier. And the assembly of smartphones and those who design and improve them: the service ADDS VALUE to the physically manufactured object. And in these cases, the added value is itself of higher value than the original physical object.
Again, what the US should be doing is whatever it does best that adds the most value to the world economy, which, today, is no longer physically manufacturing things, but ADDING VALUE to things manufactured by others, elsewhere, at less cost.