For return to happen you need to have a creative economy, not an extractive economy.
Offshoring happened for the simple, dumb reason that it's cheaper and more profitable.
For all the rarara about "America", shareholder patriotism extends exactly as far as quarterly returns. If that means selling out ordinary US workers - do it. Give me the bag.
What offshoring revealed is that the US is not a culturally integrated country. The culture of the top 5% or so considers itself completely separate to the rest.
It's a political fault line that was always latent, was somewhat suppressed from the New Deal to Carter, and then came roaring back with Reagan.
Now it's operating at pathological, self-harming levels. The marrow of the country has been chewed out, and a few dysfunctional shell oligopolies, propped up by a bubble, are keeping the lie spinning.
There won't be any significant reshoring until there's a cultural change. Reshoring is just too expensive for the owner class to do more than tinker with it. Without a cultural change the owner class doesn't care enough to change that.
Offshoring happened because people dont want to buy goods that cost 3x as much just because they were made in the US. If a clothing company tries manufacturing domestically no one will buy their clothes unless theyre already an expensive brand.
Partially true, but it also happened because companies wanted to reduce cost and logistics are cheap. Sometimes this was a necessity to stay competitive. You either prohibit some trade with taxes or it is a race to the bottom to concentrate all production into countries with the lowest possible wages.
Ecological factors from logistics are missed technological development opportunity from not having local production are not factored in here as well.
I think if the wealth class wants to avoid communism and heads on pikes in the longer run, they should absolutely start to be more concerned with community and move beyond the tunnel blinders of the next quarter over long term stability.
This goes for govt doing anything but working to ensure domestic production and dual/multi sourcing of essential infrastructure.
As long as the ownership class can continue tricking half the population into directing their lust for violence towards scapegoats like illegal immigrants, there's very little reason for them to change course. The remaining half of the population then gets most of their energy used up defending against "culture war" bullshit, with many even going on the aggressive there because it's one of the few types of allowable wins in the very narrow Overton window.
Illegal immigration isn't just a scapegoat... it's a large impact on social welfare spending, infrastructure costs and housing availability. Especially when considering an increase of over 5% of the population in under 5 years without an accompanying growth in production and wealth generation in general relative to inflation.
There are limits on migration for a reason... that doesn't even consider the impacts on the larger society by weakening social cohesion.
Even then, there's plenty of indication of movement from those who want a Communist society... you only need to look at the NYC election, and the Venezuela protests to see that. Without a longer term consideration for society as part of where business/corporations operate, you will only see more drift in that direction.
Sure, it's not just a scapegoat. I'm actually pretty ambivalent about the immigration issue itself [0]. But it is still a scapegoat - the people who were violently angry about economic disenfranchisement (due to overfinancialization and massively monetary inflation) are currently all-in on cheering for the New York financial con artist for performatively going after those scapegoats while making the real problems worse, right? That right there is the pressure valve popping off, and even if the tribal buntings change and those people go back to seeing the system as their enemy in ten years, history shows they will just get hoodwinked again.
If this tiny movement towards "communism" amounts to anything of note in 20 years, I will be surprised. The pattern I've seen is that even if the current push is headed by idealistic leaders who don't give in to self-interested expedience (ie corruption), the next crop won't be. And the corporatist structure has been very good at neutralizing any real reforms, especially in the US.
[0] given equity with things like people who have been here for quite some time - those are undocumented Americans. For comparison, adverse possession, by which you can gain exclusive title to a piece of real estate by breaking the law usually only requires a few decades
Unfortunately that's a wall street problem. I don't think wall street can be fixed, at least I don't have any clue on how it's possible to fix it outside of destroying it.
Offshoring happened for the simple, dumb reason that it's cheaper and more profitable.
For all the rarara about "America", shareholder patriotism extends exactly as far as quarterly returns. If that means selling out ordinary US workers - do it. Give me the bag.
What offshoring revealed is that the US is not a culturally integrated country. The culture of the top 5% or so considers itself completely separate to the rest.
It's a political fault line that was always latent, was somewhat suppressed from the New Deal to Carter, and then came roaring back with Reagan.
Now it's operating at pathological, self-harming levels. The marrow of the country has been chewed out, and a few dysfunctional shell oligopolies, propped up by a bubble, are keeping the lie spinning.
There won't be any significant reshoring until there's a cultural change. Reshoring is just too expensive for the owner class to do more than tinker with it. Without a cultural change the owner class doesn't care enough to change that.