Oh, but we can....and are. There is now a lot of manufacturing being brought back into the U.S., thank God....and for good reasons.
Just a couple of them: the rise of the middle class in China.
When China first became “manufacturer for the world”, you could pay their untold zillions of workers a chicken a month or something and they’d be cool with it. With success comes greater expectations (gee, who knew). China now has a HUGE middle class, not to mention a phenomenal number of millionaires/billionaires....and they demand more. Much more.
In short, they just ain’t as cheap as they used to be. Gee golly, who saw that coming?? (ahem...cough....Japan....cough....)
Second, laws.
How many customer service/call centers were outsourced to India? Many...most. Well guess what the geniuses who did that did NOT look into? Indian law. Their “privacy laws” are vastly different from our own. Many U.S. companies learned this the hard way and have paid a HEAVY price. Screw it; not worth the exposure....bring it back.
Those are just two small examples....there are many others.
Let’s add one more: the cost of energy in this country is dropping and will continue to drop. We are now a HUGE producer of natural gas and, thanks to fracking, oil. This reduces cost of business domestically. Why pay to ship stuff from the far corner of the globe....it’s expensive....when power is cheap here, labor is plentiful, even if at a higher rate? The economics just aren’t as “obvious” as they were a decade ago (in favor of overseas manufacturing).
All good points
I think the days of Free Trade Communism/Globalism are over. You cannot create a job in the United States of America by shipping the American job to Communist China, Drug Cartel Mexico, or Rape Factory India....that is just plain economic fact
Eventually, as Communist China’s birth rate declines, they will have fewer workers. Their cost of labor will increase....to the point of it being too costly to continously ship goods 7000 mi back to the USA. Also, Communist China produes little of quality, and the only way they were competitive is by being cheap.
I can still remember a time when, if you ever stated that “Free Trade with Communist China is good”, you were considered seditious and treasonous. I think the GOP, instead of pandering to Hispanics via Illegal Alien Amnesty...would win back many of the Conservative “Reagan” Democrats in the Rust Belt states by dumping Free Trade and re-instituting Tariffs....tariffs sure worked for our nation before they were replaced by the Income Tax
Shipping manufacturing overseas was a bad economic move, and a bad national security move, as so much of our high tech and war material is now made in Communist China. Of course, you will still have those who support, willy-nilly, shipping everything over to Communist China. Hey, they are just like Sean Penn kissing up to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela
Jobs were eliminated by the millions ~ but we should be able to underprice everybody in the world on anything requiring machine processing within maybe 5 to 10 worlds.
That all of the people in the U.S. making service calls could not understand what the F**k they were saying!
Another reason to bring work back to the US or other western countries: intellectual property. You build your factory, give them the designs, the parts lists, the assembly instructions. After starting production and building up the supply chain, a manager of your factory goes down the street, uses your designs and assembly instructions and starts building YOUR product. For less than you. And then starts selling it for a little less money and a lot more profit.
Even in “The World is Flat”, the author states that non-compete agreements didn’t seem to translate into Chinese.
Automation + energy savings means that most manufacturing will probably return back to a local model. Then there are companies like Amazon building local distribution centers for timely shipping who also may see an upside in local suppliers.
Bottom line, agriculture is now done by 1 to 3 percent of the work force thanks to automation. Manufacturing is now going through the same shrinkage. At some point everything the world needs produced will be done by lights out automated manufacturing centers and probably employ about 1 to 3 percent of the work force. China and India will not be able to compete against this and will follow suit in their own countries.