Nice try on the Economics 101 - but toatlly off the mark.
In 20 years when the conflict with China gets real rather than problematic, don’t be surprised when that Arsenal of Democracy is no longer an option.
We won WWII because the American automotive plants could be turned over to airplanes and tanks, the shipyards could make carriers and destroyers, the radio makers could change over to Norden bombsights, the petroleum refineries and Goodyear make synthetic tires, and the dress companies make uniforms and combat gear.
Ask your Economics professors who’s going to do that next time around - the factories in China?
As I said in my post. You can make an argument for some protectionism because of national security concerns.
However, this isn't the 1940s. We don't fight wars by huge force deployments with lots of equipment anymore.
Yes we would need to be able to manufacture lots of bombs and equipment to fight a war with China, but not nearly on the order we did back in the days of WWII.
Our more recent conflicts have shown that you can't hold territory without lots of boots on the ground, but they also proved that we can devastate other standing armies with air power, superior technology, and smaller but better trained forces.
The Chinese have more factories with which to produce equipment in an extended conflict, but how long do you think those factories will remain standing when attacked by our superior air power?
We do need to maintain some domestic manufacturing industry. However, you might also want to think about why NAFTA helps us in such a situation?
NAFTA guarantees us access to Canadian oil. It helps keep manufacturing capacity nearby even when we can't economically keep it in the United States.
Yes it would be better if we could do everything better and cheaper than the rest of the world. Unfortunately, we can't. So we need to face reality, and do what we can to remain as productive as possible, keep our economy as strong as possible, and form alliances to our best advantage.
There is an economic philosophy that uses strong protectionism, and keeps manufacturing domestic, and forces workers to accept what wages the economy can bear and still produce products domestically.
The Soviet Union tried that. It didn't work out so well for them. If you want to make it so that most goods are made in the United States, huge sacrifices would have to be made. The money to pay unskilled workers high wages is going to come from somewhere. The regulation to force more products to be produced here will have harsh effects on our economy. We will all have to pay significantly more for the goods we buy. Reduced competition will result in reduced productivity as well.
There are a number of examples of countries that have tried strong protectionism to address economic problems, none of them have been successful. There are no worker's paradises among them despite what Hollywood tells us.
“We won WWII because the American automotive plants could be turned over to airplanes and tanks, the shipyards could make carriers and destroyers, the radio makers could change over to Norden bombsights, the petroleum refineries and Goodyear make synthetic tires, and the dress companies make uniforms and combat gear.
Ask your Economics professors who’s going to do that next time around - the factories in China?”
I have thought of this also Bill. I believe you are right that China will move from economic competition with us to a military confrontation. The good news is that todays home computers and existing US robotics allow us to build manufacturing molds for anything and retrofit any manufacturing plant for weapons manufacturing in a matter of weeks rather then a year it took during WWII. Did you see next year’s defense budget? Obviously some people at the DOD and even our dim whitted Congress have an idea our country is spread thin militarily. Now if we can clean house in intelligence and traitors in the Senate whom leaks our advanced secrets out the door, we can then have a field day with any adversary. Remember, we have robots exploring and testing soil sample on Mars while China has just shot it’s first guy past the stratosphere and barely into space.