Why is there some conspiracy for the US government to allow good jobs to leave? They didn't have to do anything, all that happened was that the rest of the world had rebuilt their bombed out factories and gotten their economy on track. Once the oil crises hit, that was that.

The government allowed companies to lower environmental and worker safety standards by outsourcing overseas without including tariffs as a function of said standards.

See, the things we buy wouldn’t be so cheap if we didn’t let some companies in china dump toxic waste for free.

I sort of agree with you about using tariffs (at least for issues of global effect, like climate change), but do you think the US government should have a policy goal of making products more expensive for American consumers and/or reducing the amount of toxic waste dumped in China?

Not more expensive per se, but more truthfully priced.

E.g. cheap rare earth minerals from China are only cheap because we are borrowing from the future people who will pay to clean up the mess.

When we more accurately price the real cost of goods by quantifying damage to the worker’s health, global environment, etc. then outsourcing would not look nearly as attractive.

> more time joining global virtue signaling parties

Could you give some examples of these parties and an estimate of how much time was spent on them? I could try to guess what you're referring to, but I don't want to put words into your mouth.

(An uncharitable interpretation of what you said would lead me to believe that you're objecting not to "virtue signaling" but to virtue itself, which is not a helpful assumption for me to make).

Which historians? I read quite a loud of American history lately and this is first time I see this claim.

It's not a controversial opinion as far as I can tell -

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-g... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/... https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/how-ame... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/07/opinion/sunday/vietnam-th...

It is not really historians and it does not really push the narrative of government "given up on citizens as reaction to them not trusting government".

Government and citizens are not even two super distinct entities, government are citizens and is put in place by citizens.

Generally one side of America so gave up on government that a guiding principal of ‘starve the beast’ (that has done so much damage to our young) became dominant.

Once people with that world view actually enter government, they don’t have a lot of desire to use government for what it could be used for in terms of helping citizens instead of consolidating powers as a function of lobbying dollars.

You wouldn't know him, he goes to a different school.