"Bringing back manufacturing to America" would result in Chinese laborers being replaced by American robots.
Absolutely. Not entirely, but in at least a large percentage and quite possibly a majority.
What few conservatives want to think about, and I don’t blame them, is the distinct possibility that the workings of the free market, via computers and automation, just may be in the throes of eliminating more and more people from the chance of a productive and decent job.
Look at the vaunted and praised “increases in productivity.” We’ll assume we can measure this accurately, which is quite an assumption. :)
Productivity is the amount of output relative to input, capital and labor. It seems pretty clear to me that even while today productivity has gone up, the ratio of capital to labor input has probably increased even more. IOW, we’re shifting from human to machine input.
This is a good thing, in general, as the remaining labor has higher value. But what about those people quite literally displaced, for whom there IS little and decreasing demand, in an economic sense.
Extend these two trends upwards indefinitely, and you will reach a point at which infinite goods are produced with zero labor input. That point will of course never (quite) be reached, but as it is approached a LOT of stuff will be produced with VERY LITTLE human input.
Only a few people will be employed, in any meaningful sense of being needed by the economy to keep operating.
What does everybody else do?
Such a society will have immense wealth, but since all human societies to date have been based on the need to incentivize humans to produce, once that need no longer exists, what will replace it?
The free market has been very good for humanity over the last few centuries, on net. There is unfortunately no guarantee this will continue to be the case in the next century and even the next few decades.