> Manufacturing goods is the root of an economy.

Not any longer.

Once upon a time, agriculture was the root of an economy, but these things change. Manufacturing became the root. But it's not any more - now technology is.

Last I checked, technology needs to be manufactured to exist. I could be wrong though.

More countries can manufacture it than can develop it. The manufacturing gets driven down to low margins. Developing is therefore the root of the economy, rather than manufacturing.

Make no mistake. Manufacturing something is just as complex if not more complex than design. When you know how to manufacture a car, you probably know how to design one as well.

You can literally be taught how to design a car in CAD. It can be done on your computer with a mouse. But to fabricate a car takes a life time of knowledge from multitudes of disciplines.

The proof is in the pudding. China is well known for replicating and ripping off patented designs in seconds because design is trivial once you know how to fabricate something.

The only reason why China can't produce an nvidia GPU is because they don't have the knowledge to fabricate it.

I don't think it's a joke. At least in the US, the free market values services a lot more than manufacturing. Services make up 79.6 of the U.S economy [1].

Granted, I don't have the stat for the entire world, so it might be bigger. Considering the US and EU are half of global GDP, I doubt it.

1) https://2016.trade.gov/publications/ita-newsletter/1010/serv...

Trust me, a modern technological economy exists because human labor is augmented by physical machines. You take away the machines you'd have a service economy similar to services provided during a time when modern machinery was nonexistent (the stone age).

>Manufacturing goods is the root of an economy. China is the root, the US is a leaf.

Let's put your statement to the test then

Can China put tariffs on iPhones, Windows operating systems, Apple computers, Intel/AMD cpus, Nvidia GPUs?

Windows is pirated by everyone in China so a tarrif is useless. iPhones and apple computers are manufactured in China so YES they can put a tarriff on every freaking part of a mobile device/computer except for the GPUs and CPUs.