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Originally Posted by Itse
However I don't see us dialing back that particular clock. For example the old industrialist era truth about specializations still holds true.
Plus there's the issue that the world simply does not need as many factories as it used to. There's just not that many manufacturing jobs to go around anymore.
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Yeah, there's no way the U.S., Canada, or any other country is dialing back the clock 50 years to put up trade tariffs and try to revive national manufacturing bases. The last time we tried to put protect national manufacturing at the expense of efficiency, we ended up with beggar-your-neighbour protectionism and the Great Depression of the 30s. And as you point out, there are simply fewer and fewer jobs in manufacturing full stop. May as well bemoan the fact that only a fraction of Canadians work as farmers as did a century ago.
I do find it interesting how socialism was originally an international endeavour, and now it's promoted solely to protect national interests. A billion people in Asia have been pulled out of poverty in the last 30 years by globalization. We no longer live in a world where you get an automatic entry into the global upper-middle-class (or lower class) owing to the geographic accident of your birth. But was the global advantage North Americans of 50 years ago enjoyed (which largely came about because of the perfect conditions of a post-war boom when the rest of the world was living in the medieval age or rebuilding from rubble) really more fair than today's world?
I don't know what the future is going to look like, but I doubt it will look much like the past. Both the left and right would be more responsible if they stopped selling nostalgia for national economic models that will never return.