It is unlikely, I think (thankfully) that we’ll have an existential war with China, because we’re both nuclear armed.
Like, say Panama has a civil war that shuts down the canal. That adds a huge cost to shipping, going around South America. Or say Europe (but not the US) gets involved in a war with Russia, redirecting the _massive_ European manufacturing capacity to local needs instead of exports.
All that is just to say, it is nice to have local production of stuff like food and energy that is needed to keep things going.
Do we employ so many such workers, that there are none left over for any sort of manufacturing?
Some of what we're seeing from the r/antiwork crowd, where a bunch of millennials and zoomers are complaining that their Starbucks jobs don't pay enough comes from the fact that, for many of them, that is the only class of job available (retail/restaurants). They might welcome regular-schedule, $17/hour jobs, which wasn't an unknown rate for manufacturing in the US when I was young in the late 1980s/1990s.
I struggle to understand the attitudes and narcissism of the leaders within this country that decided we didn't have to make our own products, that people elsewhere in the world would do it for us while we really didn't do anything at all. I wonder if they thought software could employ all the people who are griping right now about living wages and meaningful work.
Incredible reserves of natural gas and oil to start with. Massive solar and wind potential as well, way beyond other highly-populated parts of the world. A huge, skilled population capable of designing and building indigenous nuclear reactors, and the capital reserves to fund and build basically whatever is needed.
> Do we employ so many such workers, that there are none left over for any sort of manufacturing?
Money going into building inefficient factories is money not spent educating software engineers, building solar farms, or. developing new gas fracking technologies. Regardless of it being public or private capital. It's not that there aren't enough workers, it's that effort spent in one way is necessarily effort not spent in another.
Slightly reducing economic efficiency may well be worth it if the result is social stability, and almost definitely to prepare for an eventual war or crisis. But we shouldn't pretend like there's no trade-off here. That's how we got into this free-trade deindustrialised problem in the first place.
While our pricing structure and regulations favor offshore, but aren’t US tax payers bearing the true cost of safe international shipping and reliable offshore manufacturing?
It doesn't always, but let's be honest, most attempts to do so mean massive subsidies for manufacturers to set up in the US.
> but aren’t US tax payers bearing the true cost of safe international shipping and reliable offshore manufacturing
Arguably yes (although not the only e.g. British, Danish, and Greek ships are assisting in the Red Sea right now).
Probably poorer for one. Every American working in a state-subsidised manufacturing role is one less American working in an industry where the US has a competitive advantage, like software or energy production.
Of course if war breaks out that goes out the window.