Comment by nkozyra
17 days ago
We are a consumer nation because we are more prosperous than our peers. It's the same reason you buy your food at a grocery store.
Generally, the clamoring for domestic production comes down to: 1. Employment. But because we are more prosperous, our employment is aimed elsewhere. We have jobs for people that are less dangerous, less manual, and better paid.
2. A fear that without domestic production, we're at a strategic or military disadvantage. But it's not that we _can't_ produce in an emergency, we can and have historically (see: oil in the 1970s). What protects us most is hegemony, which is threatened by things like across-the-board trade wars.
3. Nostalgia for the good ol days. Look, if you want to work in a factory, we have lots of them here, still. Nobody will stop you from putting on the hard hat. But in all likelihood you have a less stressful, less dangerous, and better-paying job today.
There really isn't an argument for this. Our trade was - as all trade is - mutually beneficial. Right now we're pushing the glass to the edge of the table when it was perfectly fine where it was.
One other important note: there are things we literally cannot produce domestically due to lack of natural availability (food products, certain textiles)
How can a "prosperous" nation sustainably consume more than it produces?
As long as there's someone to produce it ... forever?
I somehow keep eating 6-10 eggs a week despite not having a chicken.
Growth. Same reason we never need the national debt to be smaller than it is.
I think people look at "national debt" as though we're buying trillions of dollars of stuff and not, fundamentally, two things:
1) mandatory saving for future, like a Social Security for the country (which is ironically also comprised of Social Security)
2) investments made into the future of the country. People buy T-bonds because they're reliable returns. Low risk, relatively low reward. If suddenly our future looks less bright, our debt will slow, but it will be a pretty telling canary in the coal mine.
It's baffling to me that people generally don't grasp this. They treat it as though we're just ... buying stuff on a credit card.
Like this goes back to Adam Smith; these questions have been answered for a long time now