Subject: Re: Trade deal with China reached
Why hand anyone else that kind of influence over your country when you don’t have to?

Why? Because there's no single "you" that's "handing" anyone anything. The situation arises from the free market transactions of millions of people and countless firms. And there's no political will to have the government intervene to override those choices.

Think about it - what could you possibly have had the government do in, say, 1967 that would have been material enough to have blocked the negative effects of the OPEC oil embargo? Would you have been able to pass a whopping big gas tax doubling the price? CAFE standards that would have forced domestic car companies to stop building the big cars consumers wanted and instead start building fuel-sipping econoboxes - before there had ever been an oil crisis and while gas was still cheap? Bah - they would have called anyone who proposed it a communist and run them out of town.

Consider the same thing with PPE (for example) in 2018 or so. To get major PPE makers to reshore to the U.S., you'd need to have created a massive subsidy program to make it economically viable for manufacturers to consider moving their very low-tech products back to America. Even then, it might not be enough just to subsidize the PPE makers - because they would need to be able to get all their components made for them, and it might not be viable to have those still being produced overseas (nor would it solve your security problem if they were). So it's not just the companies that make the PPE - it's all the companies that make the fibers and fabrics and fasteners and latex and what have you that have to get subsidized. And the companies that make the machines and tools that these companies need from time to time. You need to come up with a program that's big enough to make all of those folks - the PPE makers and the ecosystem that makes them function - economically viable for them to locate in the US more than they are today. Harder still, these have to be durable enough that they can be confident that those subsidies are lasting for years and years to make it worthwhile for them to invest in factories and disrupt their current supply arrangements so that they know they won't get whipsawed a few years in. Remember, these aren't subsidies to promote a new industry - the subsidies have to last indefinitely, because as soon as the subsidies go away it won't be economical for the companies to keep making the products here.

You think that's getting past Chip Roy and the Freedom Caucus...much less survives Elon Musk's manic twenty-somethings who are looking for "waste" to "delete, delete, delete"? A massive subsidy program for companies to make gloves and masks and all the things that go into them in the US for gazillions of dollars per job?

There's a name for people who want the government to significantly intervene in free market outcomes in order to pursue some broader public good that is different from what the market participants would do if left on their own: liberals.

If you wanted something like this to happen, you would need to empower the federal government to survey the entire breadth of the market, identify whole sectors of manufacturing that create a vulnerability in case of embargo (PPE! Medicines! Semiconductors! Durable magnets! Electric machinery!), pick the winners and losers among the various industries and industry participants, shovel massive amounts of subsidies to all those private companies to give them enough incentive to reshore in sufficient quantities to ameliorate the vulnerability, and make those subsidies enough of a durable entitlement that the companies can be sure that they'll last long enough to justify the reshoring.

Which faction of which party does that sound like to you? That's why I keep pointing to Bernie Sanders - this type of robust and muscular national industrial policy fits exactly with his political philosophy, and it would be anathema to virtually every modern elected Republican.