I’ll give you some support, as this is not a popular view on FR.
This is nothing new - the theory of comparative advantage goes back to the early 1800s, when David Ricardo used trade between England and Portugal as an example. It was very hard to produce wine in England but fairly easy to make cloth. Both could be produced in Portugal, but it was better for Portugal to focus on making wine, and trade it’s excess wine for English-made cloth. Likewise, the theory is that we will be better off by allowing the Chinese to make our iPads while use create software applications that run on them.
One can argue that there is a role for government to help define and focus investment and innovation on key national priorities. This was the role played by MITI in Japan in the 1950s focusing that countrys energy on miniaturization, which led to industrial growth ranging from transistor radios (semiconductors) to cameras (video and optics).
It is hard to urn-ring the bell. Outsourcing non-core functions to a country or region with a comparative advantage is what good businesses are supposed to do. It may be possible to find a middle ground that aligns corporate profits and potential with public value, but the leadership of the last 40-50 years has not risen to that challenge. The last example was Kennedy’s “putting a man on the moon and returning him safel to earth”...think of the power a unifying national vision might have today. (And I don’t mean “green jobs”).
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