[central_va]

Factories create goods(wealth). The other things you describe while important are only "value" added work. You can't drive a great engineering design program. You can't eat a well manged accounting process and you can't mine for medical records.

There are only three ways to create wealth, mine it, make it, or grow it. Any country that is heavily into agriculture, manufacturing and mining is a wealthy country.

[Lorianne]

I agree with that about the ways to create wealth. But those are not independent unless we are talking a subsistence level economy.

Mining and agriculture jobs (which you cannot ‘outsource’ per se as they depend on a physical location) plus manufacturing jobs is what compared to all these other jobs I mentioned, the ‘economic framework’ kind of jobs?

Yes, we should mine, grow it, make it here as much as possible. However, only one of those 3 can be physically ‘outsourced’.

There are many other types of jobs which can be (and have been) easily outsourced. Banking, finance, accounting, legal services, design, engineering, record keeping ... these are jobs that are a big part of a modern, non-subsistence level, economy.

Now, if we are talking about a subsistence level economy, those jobs would all be here or come back here anyway. In that scenario we could not afford food grown elsewhere or materials mined or extracted elsewhere.