BS. You act as if the world economy is a rational beast unfettered by actual people, politics, systems of government. So China is using the money we give them to build more missiles pointed at China. That is politics, not economics. So, we are employing illegals. That's politics again, not economics.
The almighty dollar is not ALL that conservatism is about. It is about conserving our culture, and our identity. America was about rugged individualism, reliability. Small towns where you could make clothes and sell them to the baker who made your bread, who bought his furnace from the blacksmith. Pretending that service jobs are just as good as American manufacturing, American pride in products made as home just because we can squeeze a few extra bucks in is ridiculous.
It's like saying that McDonald's eating is just as good as a home cooked meal. It's really cheap and all. That is what is important. Tea and coffee my ass. We import computer chips for guided missiles from Taiwan. Hope China doesn't bomb them with our technology, and missiles built with our greenbacks.
I believe that model ended in the 19th century. Since you're so into rugged individualism, why don't you tell us how to make a pencil from raw materials.
That pretty much ended with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
In fact, the most destructive aspect of any business model based on "mass" (mass production, transportation of large quantities of products, etc.) is that it basically conditions a very large segment of the population to live their entire lives with the expectation that they will rely on someone else for their well-being.
Actually, no ... that's probably driven more by economics. Both illegal immigration (insourcing of labor) and outsourcing of manufacturing, point to the fact that American wages and expectations are probably too costly, in relation to the rest of the world.
Without doubt a lot of that extra cost is imposed by politics; but at some level politics and economics merge.
If we tried to make everything here that we needed we wouldn't have as much stuff because of the inefficiencies illustrated by the article. Perhaps we wouldn't have been able to develop the technologies in the first place if we tried to do it all ourselves.
I'm big on self reliance, but stopped changing my own oil years ago since I figured out it only saves me about 5 bucks to do it myself. My time is worth 10 times that at least doing other work.
You recognize in your point that specialization and division of labor are good things. Technology, transportation and increasingly free trade between nations has turned your small town example into the global reality.