Well I agree with you 100% that we need to fix things.
Though I seem to disagree on the fact, we need to stop sending American manufacturing to China, and bring back manufacturing to America.
For 30 years now we have exported American manufacturing.
Now everything is imported.
Yet we continue to be the only country, exporting our factories.
Everyone else is acquiring them.
We did real well for the 200 years America was a production country.
Somehow we seem to be rapidly losing all that, by exporting our jobs and factories.
I think manufacturing is doing pretty well in the south. I live in SC and we have several large manufacturers here in the upstate and the new Boeing plant in North Charleston. I know there are car companies in other southern states. Unions drove the manufacturers overseas. Eliminate the unions (SC is right to work, of course) and watch manufacturing expand, IMHO.
Somehow we seem to be rapidly losing all that, by exporting our jobs and factories.
EPA, OSHA, EEOC, etc, regulation without representation.
I strongly disagree that manufacturing is that important.
Computers run the world right now, and it will only become more pervasive. As long as Americans can design circuits, write code, it’s going to be a bright future.
Besides, manufacturing is doing OK in the South for products where it makes sense to build here, rather than to ship here. The free market will always rebalance itself against every possible regulation that the government comes up with. Remember the free market cloaks itself in oppressive regimes, and becomes the black market. Higher risk, of course, but it doesn’t matter... the free market is the natural progression of human thought and endeavors at the macro level. We all tend to operate in our own self interest... even socialist politicians and bureaucrats. China’s government will eventually fall to the wealthy elite that is rapidly growing there.
If you want to stop the flow of jobs to China, where the free market naturally directs its resources, we need to cut our regulations and bureaucratic structure established in government. Eventually, something will happen that will trigger this return to freedom again. It took 40 years of creeping socialism to put Reagan in, but it did happen, and many thought we’d be stuck with the liberal agenda forever.
Just forcing companies to bring back jobs by regulatory control will never work. You would kill this country faster than the liberals. Prices will sky rocket, the economy will come crashing to a halt, innovation would die.
The free market has to produce a country like the USA occasionally, and it will have to liberate a people like the citizens of the United States from creeping socialism occasionally. The free market can be said to be second to only God in it’s absolute power of the guidance of world power.
People love to regulate. Particularly if they are in government at any level. It gives them a great feeling of power over others. Governments love to tax. Those two things are largely responsible for the loss of manufacturing in America.
Some states recognize those facts and mitigate them in order to attract business. Look at Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina among the few who now attract and hold industry. They are models of what works, as opposed to those states who continue to lose their industrial and business bases and embrace the left wing state religion.