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.
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.