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We all know why

Yes, traitors in our government who are undermining the free enterprise system conducting a globalist war on the American people called "free trade". The problem is they have to reconstruct our government, sell off our vital infrastructure and resources to foreign governments and companies, and steal our tax money from us while negotiating jobs out of our economy under the auspices of the WTO in order to subsidize and bribe countries and corporations to cooperate.

You wrote: "Nope, we don't make a lot of stuff here any more. We all know why and there aren't a lot of attractive alternatives."

Like steel, and batteries, and electronics components, the sort of things that go into military hardware and logistics pipelines. We buy these things from China, which also holds our debt.

And this means that, no matter what China does, we can never go to war with China. They own the capstone of our financial economy, and they own the productive means of key components in our military logistics supply chain. THEY make the stuff, we don't. We have truly sold them the rope by which they can hang us, all in order to buy socks for $2 instead of $5.

Economically, it seemed like a good deal.
But we pawned national security for cheap consumer goods.
The means of industrial production are the means for war.
We have gutted the industrial base, and contineu to do so, and we are transferring the industrial base to the country that outnumbers us 5:1 and which is our most likely adversary, and our principal ideological opponent in the industrialized world.

We pawned our birthright for a mess of cheap pottage.

And there is no apparent repentance, or even realization of the problem!, from many rock-ribbed Republicans, per this thread.

The economic mentality of the GOP seems to be Maginot.