I’ve always been a pro-marketplace capitalist. Wealth creation benefits society. Socialism steals wealth and redistributes it, which harms society.
That being said, I think that since about 1970, American corporations have focused totally on their shareholders and on giving quarterly bonuses to their executives. Screw the workers. Can corporate profits go up if we off-shore manufacturing to China? Screw the workers! Can corporate profits go up if we cancel pensions, cut hours, and trim benefits? Screw the workers! Is it best to seek government favors rather than pursue good business practices? Screw the workers!
Our society is driven too much by money. Big Business and Big Government have built something that works well for them, but not for us.
Unfortunately, the American consumer showed a lot of short sightedness, choosing price over their own tax base and each other's jobs. That's what made it profitable - for them.
We may have saved a few pennies in the short term, but in the long term we got unsustainable debt, an angry young generation that can't find the jobs they trained for who are being used as fodder for the left's calls for violence, and a hostile communist government in China that is actively using our consumer dollars against us. Meanwhile, we needed to raise the debt ceiling in 2024 just to pay the interest on all of the money we borrowed.
The sad part is, we could have stopped this from the start simply by choosing American made, but far too many of us didn't care.
yep