Comment by losvedir

As a software engineer dealing with bits and bytes all day, it's easy to lose sight of the hard and sharp parts of reality. My wife is a chemical engineer who actually goes into a factory and is constantly dealing with production issues in actually making soap, ice cream, chemicals flow (different factories over her career).

JD Vance had an interview somewhere (I think in the NYTimes?) where he claimed that national prosperity is downstream of military might which is downstream of industrial base. It made me stop and think, because that does line up with what I was taught about how the Allies won WW2, and the US beat the Soviets in the Cold War: we outproduced them. I'm not sure if this is "fighting the last war", though, since I imagine a lot of warfare going forward is going to be technological and with things like drones, etc.

It's just so easy to deal with our economic abstraction, of dollars flying around, and computer work, and services and so on, that I sometimes do wonder about your point here about the actual physical, production of goods, and how important that is. Can you have a long term, stable, healthy, successful country that doesn't (and can't) produce anything physical?

We clearly can still make some stuff. I have a great squat rack and barbell set from Rogue Fitness, which makes stuff here in the USA (captured in this beautiful advertisement video[0]), and it's awesome. But I also have a made-in-the-USA wood pellet smoker which is garbage, and which I kind of wish I had just bought from China.

All to say, yeah, I think there's the potential for there to be something along the lines of what you're saying. That said, the implementation is maybe not great. Even taking the Tesla Texas Gigafactory, which was built in warp speed (construction to first cars in about 1.5 years), that's only leaving 2 years before a potential next administration could roll back the tariffs if they wanted.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aCMGqA6_XY