There's an element of cargo cultism involved here. Some of the industries being talked about were cutting edge at the time they were based stateside. Shoes. Textiles. Commodity flat-rolled steel. The idea here is that if we merely start making some of these low-tech products stateside again, Arthur Winkler will dust off his leather jacket, and Ron Cunningham and his celluloid high school buddies will leap out from behind TV screens and resurrect the 50's era, when the dollar was king, and the world's factories, outside of the US, were in ruins. If only that were true.
In reality, countries prosper, or not, based on the quality of their human resources and the scope and scale of their natural resources (timber, cultivable land, rainfall, mineral deposits, etc) and technological innovation. We've hit the jackpot on both. From the submarine to the A-bomb, Americans have pioneered and continue to pioneer leading edge technologies. Without these technologies, we'd be Australia, a prosperous First World country, a land of milk and honey. But it's these technologies that make the US a force to be reckoned with on the world scene. Not sunset industries like shoes, textiles and commodity flat-rolled steel. There are natural resource-rich countries with sky-high trade tariffs. Two of these countries are Argentina and Brazil.
Couldn’t agree more and Argentina was the US of South America. They failed because they lacked the institutions and culture to support a dynamic market system. Their Catholicism with its inherent socialism and preference for the heavy hand of government handicapped them and has ruined their economy - still is ruining it.
Take a look at Chile. Why are they succeeding?