> Now, if the US had not been run by capitalists, the US government could have easily stopped this.

Yes, because the USSR did it right. You know, since capitalism is at fault...

I don't know if you were educated and live in the US or not. This "capitalism is evil" meme is yet another reduction of the realities of the world to a single variable. And it is simply silly. Sorry.

I look around my home, desk, driveway, even what I am wearing and the medicine I take and NONE of it would have existed without capitalism. In fact, China would still be an agrarian society without capitalism.

Please stop reducing reality from the complex multivariate problem it actually is to a single variable. "Capitalism = Bad" is a truly lousy explanation of how the world works.

As I said before, I have been in manufacturing for decades, nearly four decades actually. I have gone from being able to make just about anything I wanted in the US to only being able to make a small subset of non-trivial products in the US. And NONE OF IT has to do with capitalism.

Capitalism isn't the cause of these problems. It's a complex game of chess involving many variables, where wages represent one lower-level variable in the equation. If wages were the single variable that could fix this we could automate the heck out of everything and regain supremacy. Sadly, as I said before, and I will say it again, reality responds to dozens of variables and wages, as it turns out to be, while important, are not the cause of our (and Europe's) current predicaments.

Not sure how else to say it: We are at a moment in time when we, quite literally, simply cannot manufacture hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of basic materials, components and products in the US and Europe. The entire supply chain is in China. Period. Which means that anyone wanting to manufacture anything that doesn't fall under certain categories (like ITAR) has no choice but to go make whatever they make in China. Capitalism has nothing to do with it. They are more capitalistic than almost any nation in the world.

Why it happened is also a multivariate problem. Two of those variables are bad policies and mismanagement on the part of our politicians and the initial allure of cost reductions (of which, yes, 50 years ago, wages were an important factor). Once the chain reaction started the end result was almost inevitable.

Say you, me and one other person manufactured drinking glasses in the US or Europe back 50 years ago. We each have about 1/3 of the market for drinking glasses.

I decide I am going to be smart, manufacture my glasses in China, drop the prices and grab half the market for myself. I quietly make that move and show up in the market with glasses for 25% less. You and the other competitor drop your profit margins, optimize like hell and do your best to keep manufacturing your products in the US and Europe to compete with me.

You can't. You realize your choices have narrowed to two: Go to China or shut the doors.

You go to China.

Now you match my pricing and regain some market share. Eventually the third participant is forced to do exactly the same thing.

We have now all moved our manufacturing to China, dropped our prices, reduced our net profits and go back to a 1/3 share of the market each. Except, in doing this we lost our ability to manufacture locally. We also likely killed-off local suppliers of some of the items, tools, systems and services we employed at our factories. And, of course, thousands of people lost their jobs.

Ten years pass and our Chinese suppliers --having learned to make our products-- are now private labelling the same products to dozens of companies around the world. We go from having 1/3 market share to 1/10 and some of us simply go out of business.

Another ten years go by and the Chinese manufacturers come directly into our markets and sell the products they now manufacture exquisitely at even lower prices. Places like Walmart make deals with them to private label direct to consumers and bypass the "manufacturer" middle-men. We are now out of business, with, perhaps, only a couple remaining, who undoubtedly private label from the same manufacturers and become marketing brands --far removed from their manufacturing origins.

As this continues, industry after industry, baseline suppliers of raw components disappear. Very soon you can't even buy screws and wires made in the US and Europe, much less chips, displays, cloth, tools and machinery.

This is how we get to a situation where, in a pandemic, we can't make masks because we don't own the supply chain or the equipment suppliers. We can't even make the thread and the cloth we need to make masks.

This last part is what highlights that wages or capitalism are not the problem at all. You could have thrown billions of dollars at the problem (maybe they did, don't know) and you still would not be able to manufacture N95 masks at scale for probably a year or more.

Ventilators? Forget it. The whole thing was a sad joke. If that didn't teach everyone just how wrong we've been and how badly we mismanaged our industrial base, I don't know what will.

The one example I like to use about political mismanagement is the treaty signed in the late 1800's that effectively gives China free or nearly free shipping across the US. It costs me more to ship something from Los Angeles to New York than it costs a Chinese company to get a product from Beijing to New York.

That is insane. Even if I could manufacture the exact same product at the exact same cost (which is impossible given supply chain realities) I would lose on shipping. My Chinese competitors would be able to offer free shipping anywhere in the US. I would have to take a loss on every sale to be able to match that.

One treaty did that. And our politicians have done nothing about it for 150 years. Nothing to do with capitalism. Everything to do with incompetence and mismanagement.

Please, don't misunderstand, I get it, people who are not in manufacturing are not equipped to understand these realities. It's like trying to understand how a bird feels while flying without being a bird. A bit of an extreme analogy but the idea is what counts. There's a reason for which my favorite saying, attributed to Mark Twain, is: "A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way". It's true.

You can either accept what I am saying, go do some digging and understand it, or reject it. The sad part is that this will not change reality.