When automation first became a real thing I was a much younger business school prof. I asked my students what would society do with all of our factory workers, then beginning to be replaced with digitally controlled machines?
It appears I asked the right question, even though I misdiagnosed the threat. Automation proved to be much less of a threat than foreign workers who work much more cheaply than U.S. workers.
The real threat to our factory jobs occurred when companies sent the work abroad to poor countries, and then imported the resultant products which they could sell more cheaply and still make good profits. This left whole swaths of our workforce without meaningful (i.e., family supporting) employment.
Sending our manufacturing abroad was like beginning to abuse alcohol or drugs. The cheap goods reward was immediate whereas the idle worker downside became obvious in time. The deaths of despair came later with suicides, addiction, overdoses, homelessness, plus family disintegration and formation failure.
Another downside to doing manufacturing overseas is that it leaves our nation unable to rapidly gear up for war. If the factories no longer exist here, they cannot be converted to military production when control over lines of transport and communication literally becomes a life and death matter, as it did following Pearl Harbor.
Now much of our manufacturing is being done in a nation - China - with which even optimists believe we could end up being at war. For both job creation and military preparedness reasons we must repatriate our manufacturing plants, bring them home and staff them with our citizens. If this message is populist, so be it. I see it as win-win-win with the third win being self-reliance.
Time was our working class could support a family and buy a modest home on a factory salary. We need to recapture that dynamic which worked much better than the current arrangement. Perhaps we could even get our birth rate back up?
Make American Great Again
