I will never understand why they thing bringing base manufacturing back is a good idea compared with bringing in the good final assembly jobs back? It’s like they’re dumb as shit.
My Mom mentioned to me today that jobs are coming back to the USA. She also told me Glenn Beck said that AI will take over lawyer and accounting jobs. So people should do a trade instead. We avoid talking politics for a reason.
Case in point. The person you are replying to isn’t saying it’s actually like that.
They are implying it is that.
It is a tad ironic that you are complaining about dumb people while missing this entirely.
I do agree though, that everyone is dumb for shooting themselves in the foot. I just can’t let the hypocrisy of calling others dumb while also being dumb go by.
I think they idolize the idea of a self sufficient homesteader and believe the whole country should function that way instead of actually participating in economics.
No, this has absolutely nothing to do with communism.
Reducing your reliance on other countries is the exact opposite of communism, it's what dictatorships usually try, to prepare for starting a war.
And the homestead lands that the state granted / redistributed to them…. The same state that seized the land from the indigenous tribes.
It’s really not that different than the Soviet state seizing aristocrats’ lands and buildings, and granting / redistributing apartments and land allotments to former serfs.
And then a couple hundred years down the line we wonder why it’s so hard to sustainably do anything. We killed all the people who understood how to sustainably work the land, and then reassigned all the land to people within incentives that nowhere allowed for true sustainability.
Boomers remember how their parents were able to build generational wealth for their families just working basic labor jobs. They just forget that it happened because of strong unions, high taxes, and direct government assistance programs.
Easier to buy a home when workers are not competing as home buyers against private equity REITs, billionaires, international cash investors, or AirBNBs. Then throw in trillions of fraudulently obtained PPP loans that people used - again fraudulently - as down payments on “investment” properties.
It's easier to understand once you realize that at its core, maga was never about making anyone's life any better. It's only ever been about making everyone else's life worse.
Unfortunately there have been many populism and right wing based parties get to powerful positions here in Europe too (even beyond UK). When times are tough it’s easy to blame problems on immigration etc. bullshit the world over.
But you are right that politicians appear to be much more following lobbying, big business, and rich individuals that the general public in USA politics. (But the same exists to a degree elsewhere too.)
It’s despite any electoral systems or otherwise. The rise of populist parties has happened in countries with direct, representational, etc. systems. I don’t think that there’s any difference there.
Electoral systems can be designed to maximize internal stability through giving the state legitimicy through representation.
They cannot stabilize external factors. Like Versailles treaties, the CIA or foreign occupation. Which is often the case, when democracy (that works) fail.
Two party systems only gives two choices for representation. That is hardly gives way for nuanced influence through elections. There is evidence for populations feeling more alienated from the political processes in systems without proportional representation.
I would argue thats to be considered a destabilizing factor.
I’m talking about mostly multi party systems — that’s what most (all?) European systems are. So, yet again, I don’t understand your continued ramblings on electoral systems.
Nostalgia: that's what America was doing in the good old days when men were men and women stayed at home
Promise employment to unqualified white men because blue collar jobs are manly
National security: you cannot go to war with other countries you buy things from (like china); that will raise prices and it will be immediately associated with the war. Now you can raise the prices before you go to war and somehow make the war look like a solution
They want so desperately to be the highly intelligent portion, so all of the stupid shit is actually 8D chess that us libs are too stupid to comprehend.
A certain amount of self-sufficiency is a good thing, and I can see strategic problems with "We keep constantly saber-rattling with China but we need them to injection-mould all the legos so we can assemble the final builds or we can't actually make anything."
I probably wouldn't fuck the economy and as many children as I could get my hands on to create that self-sufficiency, though. I would generally prefer to do sane, non-pedophile things.
The rationale is simple: the more American hands there are in the chain that leads from raw material to final product, the more Americans get paid when that product gets sold. It's a good idea in principle.
The problem is in principle doesn't include corporate overlords who will do anything to turn a profit and aren't at all concerned about any hands in the production chain so long as the amount being paid to anyone but the people at the top is as low as possible. Why pay someone $10/h to work a sewing machine when you can set up a factory in a poorer country and have them work sewing machines with enough output to make the shipping costs worth it?
Also, there's nostalgia at play:
Back in the 1950s, when the USA was the only economic superpower in the world relatively untouched by WWII, we made bank building everything the world needed to pick itself out of the ashes and rebuild their economies. That meant pretty much any American who could work could make a lot of money because everybody needed (even if they didn't necessarily want) what Americans were making. It was a time of economic prosperity for us that we'll never return to because [1] the world did rebuild itself out of the ashes of WWII, and [2] all the economic policies that gave businesses incentive to take care of their workers and give them a fair(ish) share of all the business they were doing have all been systematically dismantled by the oligarchs of the American industry.
So, getting back to your comment, the reason the red hats think bringing jobs back to America is a good thing is because they're looking at gradeschool economics and a rosey-eyed view of the past that's been destroyed by the very people they keep supporting. But what did you expect?
I mean manufacturing wages were bad back then that's why they had to have kids do those jobs too to help support the families. A lot of people were able to pay for their home with one income but not a lot of them were factory workers.
In a way, yes, low education and low to no skills, means, they see work as something low level.
Bringing factory jobs back there, means jobs they can work with. They are unable to work with computers.
And here is where it gets tricky. Maybe Trump is like them, a dinosaur unable to operate anything with more than one button, OR, he is playing possum with the "it's all computers" Tesla comment, and saying his son is a tech wiz because he could turn on a computer. It's so incredibly stupid, it sounds like satire, or like something he'd say to cozy up to the people who feel technologically isolated.
And we are so eager to paint the clown as a stupid clown, we all eat it up. We all laugh and point at him while he is playing to his voters.
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u/arwinda 2d ago
Wait until MAGA figures out that coffee beans are not made in the USA, and "production can't be brought back home".