Nice rhetorical reply. Funny you can’t provide a single example and our stores continue to be swamped with items labeled “Made In China”, we still have counterfeit Chinese chips in our military equipment, and we still buy Airbus refuelers and Eurocopters while canceling domestic orders from Boeing—and our steel gets sold to us by Russia and China while I look at the skeleton of the former Bethlehem Steel, ad nauseam. Your puffery rapidly fizzles into “we make stuff” . . . sorry, but until I’m surrounded by “Made In USA” labels in the stores and we don’t have reports of almost half the families in the country receiving some kind of government assistance, never mind our public debt shrinking instead of inexorably growing, or having our domestic companies being bought lock, stock and barrel by alien firms, until we lend to China and get them to do what we tell them instead of vice versa, I will remain firmly convinced of my current point of view.
“Your puffery rapidly fizzles into ‘we make stuff’”
That’s true, but first of all specifying “Chinese chips” and name-dropping Hamilton demonstrates nothing. More importantly, the fact that we have a larger industrial capacity now than during the Great Depression (!) is so obvious as to demand no demonstration. I can just say it, and honest people would pause and admit it to themselves, and that’s all that should be necessary.
If you wish to persist in asserting we are less prepared for war with China, Russia, or whoever else you’ve built up in your mind as boogeymen, now than when we were when we were still British subjects, then you are beyond argument. We’re in the habit of fighting two or more wars on the other side of the dang globe nowadays. Americans of 1917 and 1941 would look upon us as Spartans.