Oh we have the creative mindset. One only needs to look at the engineering genius that drives our military industrial complex and our entertainment (entertainment delivery and production) industries to see that we have the MINDPOWER to make it big.
What we are lacking is the industrial base to drive it forward.
We will never, ever, ever be able to compete with competent labor that produces high quality products at $4 an hour.
It is this lack of industrial power that is hurting us. And it will not come back. Ever.
This is why we use our homes as ATMs and run up credit card debt. We are doing nothing but moving money around in the service economy.
The only people producing anything these days are the folks that mint silver and gold coin.
The Dems hate America, and want a multi-polar world, and love Communism, as they fondly imagine that they will be among the surviving Kommisars instead of the first ones against the wall.
The industrialists want cheaper costs, less litigation and red tape, escape from unions, and *growth*. Which means they got all excited about the Demographics of the Third World, and realized that in order to sell to the Third World, they had to send gobs of money over there. Nice dovetail; except that much of the Third World, not having the memory of a Christian worldview filtered through a self-sufficient, politically independent middle class, took the money and created vast swaths of inequality instead.
(They don't notice that the 'savings' on labour are spread out throughout other areas not easily isolated to a single line-item).
China, India, and the rest get our jobs, our prestige, our money (trade deficit) and a hollowed-out U.S.
Then the "powers that be" decided, screw actually *producing* anything (as you pointed out): they can make more money on moving money around, profiting from price arbitrage, and on betting on *changes* in value. If you guess wrong, demand a bailout; if you guess right, you keep the money.
I think this dates to the mid-to-late 1970s and really took hold under Jack Welch and ilk in the 1980s, along with the cult-of-CEO-worship dating from that time. (And all the lower-level executives demanded commensurate increase in salary, perks, and status, as befitted aspiring-CEOs such as themselves.)
And some of it is good old fashioned robber-baron-style greed: Microsoft was sitting on $50 billion in CASH with no debt not too long ago (2003 or 2005 or so). By investing in US Treasuries (until recently, the "risk-free" return) they could have taken in $1 billion / year without jeopardizing the principal or the cash flow from continuing operations.
So any talk of going to India (as Brian Valentine said, "Think India! Two for the price of one!") was nothing but monstrous, inhuman greed on a scale to make Ebenezer Scrooge blush.
NO cheers, unfortunately. They are all scum.
Wanna bet?