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Comment by synergy20 | Hacker News Reader

after 50 years of de-industrialization in US, it's a sad fact that US can no longer produce most of those items, yes it's totally gone. It will take a few decades to rebuild, if possible at all. For now, whatever those junks are at Amazon, there are not many options to procure them elsewhere.

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You want the US to spend the next few decades retooling to ... build junk?

Build essential stuff locally, not junk of course. Or else the virtual economy can not sustain forever based on borrowing money while producing very little locally.

What is "essential stuff" to you?

well, produce own steel. Own processors, own drug precursors...

This weird demoralization has to stop. We went to the moon in less than 10 years from beginning the Apollo program. It’s less than 10 years to build a nuclear power plant on average. We deployed the COVID vaccine worldwide in less than one year. Manufacturing is not that hard. If we want to do it, we can do it and we can do it quickly.

True. The biggest impediment to increased manufacturing is the pile of onerous regulations, many of which were created by the stroke of a pen since 2008, and which can be removed by another stroke of the pen.

The biggest impediment is the misallocation of capital and the lack of regulations controlling corporations.

Do you have any substantiation for either the point that onerous regulations are the primary impediment or that most of these have been created since 2008 (by fiat or otherwise)?

It's always going to be cheaper to make things in places where labor costs and environmental responsibility expectations are low.

> It's always going to be cheaper to make things in places where labor costs and environmental responsibility expectations are low.

Yeah, offshoring was mostly about driving down costs by laundering labor and environmental law.

That's why the manufacturing companies did it. The politicians allowed it because it was meant to make the world more peaceful and prosperous. Which it did, really.

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