Producing is completely different from manufacturing. Manufacturing is low-level grunt work that we would do well to export overseas to uneducated third-worlders or design a machine to do for us. Those jobs should be thrown into the dustbin of history just like we have constantly done over the years with manual labor-intensive jobs.
The country that actual INVENTS and DESIGNS new products is the powerful country. That is what we are in constant competition with other countries to do and where we continue to hold a massive advantage.
Actually building and manually assembling those designs is useless and irrelevant. If the countries we export that grunt work suddenly blow up tomorrow, we could easily start up a factory to get that work done here in a very short time. In the meantime, we are much better off taking advantage of the cheap foreign labor or even better building machines to replace those jobs permanently, as every industry has tried to do from the beginning of time.
Economic progress is defined best by ELIMINATING the need for and the corresponding cost of labor. Eliminating jobs and/or reducing the cost of labor is what radically lowers the price of goods and increases the standard of living for everyone.
“Producing is completely different from manufacturing.”
Manufacturing is production, while not all production is manufacturing. Maybe you should study common sense before posting such idiotic drivel.