No. of Recommendations: 13
They can accomplish an awful lot without firing a shot.
They're not good guys. Far, far from it.
I'm not saying they're good guys. I'm saying it's a massive national security win for us if they're not firing shots.
One of the most significant national security threats to the United States - a real one - is the threat of nuclear weapons. China is one of the world's major nuclear powers, and one of only two nations that could actually substantially destroy the United States. A "hot war" involving China is one of the gravest threats to our country. Things that reduce the chances of that happening, even by small amounts, have an enormous benefit to our security. And that benefit is probably larger than any of the detriments you outlined above.
I'll disagree with you here. America is actually home to a number of light and medium manufacturing shops and has existing infrastructure. Do we need more? Sure. But not nearly on par with the New Deal or whatever it is that Bernie Sanders wants.
It's not the same thing. We have manufacturing, but we can't do the type of labor-intensive low-value manufacturing at scale that would enable the critical product manufacturing that you want to be relocated here.
Those types of manufacturers can't be sustained in a vacuum. They need to cluster. They need to have access to vast pools of labor, other manufacturers who are making the parts and tools and components (and the tools and machinery that other manufacturers use to make the parts and components), and a transportation infrastructure capable of meeting their needs. And all those other firms and companies and actors can't come here if their only customers will be the specific "critical" manufacturers we deign to subsidize.
IOW, the stuff that the "critical" goods manufacturers need to have available to them is orders of magnitude greater than what we can currently provide in the U.S. We don't have, and can't have, a few million low-wage workers living in government-built SRO housing barracks waiting that can be used to flood the factory floors of countless low-value component manufacturers that make up the supply chain for the "critical" goods. We don't have, and won't fund, the type of massive public works, transportation, and utility infrastructure that needs to be undertaken by the national government in order to service all those factory floors. The "critical goods" that you'd prefer to have manufactured here are the tip of a big pyramid that supports their production, and you can't have that tip of the pyramid without building the whole pyramid. China was able to build that pyramid because their country was filled with uneducated subsistence farmers for whom the low-value factory jobs needed at the base of the pyramid were a massive step up in quality of life. The U.S. long ago moved past that point.
To build that pyramid here in the United States would require a complete reworking of our economy. There's absolutely no market basis for moving all that low-value manufacturing capacity here (the market doesn't care about national security, after all), so you would need a level of federal intervention in the private economy never before seen in the U.S. to make it happen. The federal government would have to wrench both capital and labor out of where it would normally go in response to market forces and mandate that it go into basic manufacturing and all the things that basic manufacturing needs, at 10x the level of difficulty that China had in doing that because our workers are already so well paid (relative to global levels). And we'd have to recreate all the public works and governmental projects that China spent the last several decades building - the roads and rails, the ports and shipping, the utility lines and power generation. Again, the government would have to do that (either directly or indirectly), because there's no market reason for any private actors to be doing any of that. You can't do it with tariffs.
That undertaking would run contrary to everything the GOP stands for in domestic policy. It would run contrary to nearly all of what most Democrats would support, since the center of even the Democratic party wouldn't be okay with that level of government direction of the national economy. Only the far left of the Democratic party - the Sanders wing - would be comfortable with subordinating the market to the direction of the government to that extent.
