We don't onshore because we are higher up the economic food chain, and can do more specialized work. The people high up that chain in the US are the same class who conceive of minimum standards for living quality for the whole country, effected by things like minimum wages, welfare, and all manner of government safety regulations.

All of those things make a very small overlap between people who need to work such low value manufacturing jobs and those who have the skills and personality to do them. In essence, we've settled in to enormous wealth and safety by cooperating with other countries, and you are proposing that we should cooperate less and be poorer.

I'm not convinced that you're wrong, but that's what you're propounding.

Update: In other words, you're asking the national level version of "why don't we move back to the land and become self sufficient and steer clear of industrial ag and make our own food?" Same answer: we like our wealth, comfort, and safety where we are, thank you very much.

In part because we've spent the last two generations scrubbing ourselves of the intellectual capacity to have a coherent dialogue about industrial policy.

Also in part because much of our leadership isn't composed of Americans working for American national interests, it's composed of humanists who perceive themselves to be global citizens and believe in a worldwide frictionless marketplace operating under a universal liberalism that incidentally control American resources.

Leaders who act against the interests of their constituents get voted out. I can’t imagine a majority of US politicians holding the thought that American jobs must be sacrificed for the good of the world. The less convoluted reason is that Corporations make a ton more profit by manufacturing overseas and have directed their lobbying dollars into either making politicians look the other way or prohibit them from taking meaningful efforts to save domestic manufacturing.

When there's the "America is the cause of all evil" guilt (slight exaggeration), you can. A belief that what you do is moral can get people to align against their own interests.

Just because it’s a possibility doesn’t mean that it’s actually happening. If it was this would certainly be covered by the media, Politicians would have a policy platform to address this etc. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence to indicate that’s what’s happening.

Labor costs are too high. Look, once you spend decades paying pennies on the dollar for labor, it’s very hard to go back. It’s the same when people discovered free music via p2p and YouTube. How do you dial that back?

Nothing short of global war will fix this. Enter war with China where all trade is halted, and I promise you we’ll figure out how to on-shore manufacturing in a jiffy. A terrible price, but the only solution.

> Nothing short of global war will fix this. Enter war with China where all trade is halted, and I promise you we’ll figure out how to on-shore manufacturing in a jiffy. A terrible price, but the only solution.

Yes, let’s start a global military conflict between nuclear powers in the hope that an economic activity that’s no longer feasible maybe becomes feasible.