Exactly. I think a lot of people who say they "want manufacturing to come back to the USA" have a picture in their imagination of a 1950s factory employing hundreds of middle class people standing along an assembly line picking up parts with their hands and working on them, or turning bolts on a car as it goes down the line. Then the old steam whistle blows, and all those workers exit the building and drive back to their middle class 1950s homes.

This world does not exist anymore and is never coming back. If manufacturing comes back, it's going to be heavily automated plants with a lean staff of robot technicians keeping the line going. Manufacturing may come back to the USA, but those Fred Flintstone jobs are not part of the picture.

The idea that one can be functionally illiterate yet afford a home, a car and a family by spending 40hr and no more riveting spring hangers onto Chevrolets, or whatever, is a legacy from a blip in time during which the US had a bear monopoly on state of the art for the time manufacturing.

Those men who worked comparable factory jobs in the 1870s through the 1930s had wives and kids doing piece work at home. And in the 1970s their wives all went back to work again, just outside the home.

And a stable political system. If I were in the manufacturing industry, I wouldn't make big bets on moving manufacturing back to the states unless I had some real guarantees that these tariffs weren't going to go away in the next week.

It is genuinely a hard problem. Even 50 years ago or so, simply having two hands and reasonable health was a gateway to a decent-paying job. These jobs have kind of evaporated, and aren't going back. That's a bit part of the nostalgia for manufacturing, I would imagine.

In an ideal world, you would ramp up free education, churn out more skilled labour. But for many reasons, this isn't happening and isn't likely to happen soon. So what should societies do with all this "unskilled surplus labour"?

UK has sort of given up, and since 1970s whole regions of England rely heavily on continued social transfers. I.e. the bankers and the oil rigs pay for the budget, the budget pays for former miners. But that's increasingly unsustainable, not to mention massively unattractive to everyone involved.

US seems to (maybe?) follow a note darwinian approach. But this is, it seems, also not working. Bringing back manufacturing, as you say, won't fix it either. It feels like there is a whole class of people without access to good jobs or education to reskill.

Other than spending a lot of money on this, like Switzerland, I don't really know how to fix it, it is genuinely a hard problem in a liberal country. Would be keen to hear suggestions.

Trump has 4 years if he survives that long. He's an old man. The trade war can't possibly last long enough for manufacturing to be forced to restart domestically. Even if this was his first term and he got a second, by the time the second rolls around everyone would just hope to wait it out until the Democrats retook the White House and they could import everything from China again. But now no one can even make the argument and be taken seriously that we need this, because if Trump's doing trade wars then it must be a bad idea.

Proof of the uncertainty is that Wall Street clearly thinks there's a good chance he'll back off. That's why the market still has room to keep falling, rather than having already fallen as far as it will for a while. It's got a lot of room left. All that room is people betting he's not going to keep this up.

This investment thesis is about to be tested at scale.

The whole government has been bathing in the globalization alcohol for so many years that there is a huge interest group rooted for it to go forever. You can't do much without removing this group.

There is no "legal", "orderly" retreat from the current situation IMHO. It's going to be messy. The issue is whether Trump is doing the job or he is just faking it for whatever the reasons.

.. so what's the point of this again?

Once the purge is done in the public and private sectors (yeah you can imagine that such interest groups exist everywhere), Trump and his allies need to install competitive people to create and execute policies to "bring manufacturing back".

Failing either of the two (purging and reinstalling competitive policy makers) fails the job.

No one in the United States feels rich, when we look around, we don't see wealth or prosperity. We suspect, though we'd feel silly to say it out loud, that if anyone ever busted into Fort Knox and looked in the vaults, those would be empty of the gold that it was once famous for.

>What's the US supposed to look like after this purge?

I imagine we'll look like what we really have been for a long while, instead of this illusion that everyone has of us.

It will get poorer economically in upcoming years thanks to gov moves, the wheels have been set in motion. Maybe dollar will tank so that my first sentence won't be valid anymore. Not sure it will be balanced with rest above though.