[Spktyr]

Heads up, the industrial base didn’t evaporate.

It moved to the south and is alive and well, thank you very much.

[Wallace T.]

Granted there has been a lot of industrial development in the South, but the old Confederacy cannot compete with the Far East and other low cost providers of labor. The domestic automobile industry also defines domestic as all of North America, but the last time I checked, Oshawa, Ontario, and Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, were not in the United States.

The dense infrastructure of automobile and related manufacturers, machine tool makers, and primary metals producers is still in the Rust Belt. This infrastructure has been eroding for decades. If the U.S. re-established protective tariffs, the South, or even a revitalized North, could reconstruct this network. We can have our manufacturing increasingly outsourced, but we cannot sustain the sort of small wars in southwest Asia we are engaged in, much less face an increasing challenge from China or Russia, without the necessary manufacturing capacity. We have imported small arms ammunition from Israel and clothing from southeast Asia for our military. We have not had to import such basics since the Revolutionary War. If the shipping lanes are challenged by a hostile power, we may not be able to sustain even Iraq/Afghanistan type limited wars.