The “Manufacturing” Meshugas and Trump’s Tariff Tragedy
April 4, 2025
Hearing the word “manufacturing” can make me grind my teeth. It’s a key rationale for Trump’s tariffs: to “reshore” manufacturing, bringing back those good old-time jobs. Totally delusional.
Yes, at one time, the American middle thrived through well-paid work (unionized, and requiring little education) producing physical stuff. But that was then, and this is now. A different world.
At one time, over 90% of Americans had to work on farms to feed us all. Today it’s less than 3% because farming became vastly more efficient. So all that labor was freed up for other uses — like manufacturing. Enabling us to produce our food and much else besides. Making the nation richer.
Now manufacturing in turn has become much more efficient. In fact America today manufactures as much as ever, but we do it with far less labor. That’s productivity improvement — a good thing — freeing up human capital for other tasks and again thereby making us richer.
Sending all those people back into factories would make us poorer. But it can’t happen. Nobody will recreate those old-time factories, that can’t compete, no matter how much Trump promises it.
The manufacturing meshugas is not new with him. The picture outlined here has been unfolding for decades, and so has the denial of it, still romanticizing manufacturing jobs as key to American prosperity. Democrats especially have suffered this antediluvian fixation. Back in 2012, I wrote mockingly of an Obama speech exhibiting it.
But now, in service to this brain-dead idea, Trump is blowing up the global economy. Telling us all the pain this entails will be worth it because those old-fashioned manufacturing jobs will come roaring back. But wait — who will buy all the stuff we manufacture? This trade war will make other countries poorer, hence unable to buy so much from us. The whole thing is a lose-lose proposition.
Whereas trade, which Trump hates, is win-win. The beauty of a globalized free market free-trading system (excuse those dirty words) is that each country produces what it can make best and cheapest, selling to other countries, enabling it to buy from them what they make best and cheapest. Everyone gets better and cheaper goods. Every country gets richer. Sure there are some losers, some jobs go away, but that’s outweighed by the benefits to a nation as a whole. A fundamental logic we’ve lost sight of. Tariffs, by screwing it up, make everyone poorer.
America’s future prosperity does not lie with manufacturing jobs — no more than in 1880 it was keyed to farm jobs. The world is again different, and we must live in the 21st century, not the 20th. That means turning our efforts toward 21st century industries and opportunities, rather than wasting them trying restore the 20th. We must look forward, not backward.