The likelihood of the industrial economy of 60 years ago returning is, at best, chimerical. Cities like Pittsburgh have long since moved on from their smokestack legacies, investing resources in education and medicine. If Pittsburgh’s air were as smoky as it was in the days when men in white-collar jobs had to bring a second shirt with them to the office because the first would be speckled with soot by lunchtime, it would not be a finalist for Amazon’s second headquarters.
And even in the profoundly unlikely circumstance that the domestic steel industry regained its former preeminence, chances are it wouldn’t employ nearly as many people as it did in its heyday, not with many of the tasks in manufacturing now being carried out by robots.
The mental midgets we lovingly call Free Traitors™ are some of the stupidest people on earth.