We Didn't Kill American Manufacturing—We Let It Die

The American elite are treating our country like a Hospice Patient. We need to wake up before they let us die in our sleep.

I inherited my Papaw’s ability to fix things. Not from his genes, but from watching him work – rebuilding carburetors on his kitchen table, welding broken farm equipment, making something from nothing because that’s what you did. He could diagnose an engine by ear, fix it with basic tools, and have it running better than new.

For generations we taught people how to build things, how to fix things, how they worked. People learned how to contribute to their communities and their country. We trained engineers, trades people, builders and makers.

That knowledge is dying out. Not because young people are lazy or stupid, but because we’ve built an economy where knowing how things work doesn’t pay. Where making things doesn’t matter. Where the real money is in financial engineering, not actual engineering.

My furniture component manufacturing business collapsed after NAFTA and CAFTA. We made parts for Lazy Boy, Berkline, Universal Furniture. Real things that ended up in real homes. One day we’re running three shifts, can’t keep up with orders. Six months later, my customers are switching to imported components for 40% less. A year after that, many of them are shutting down entirely or becoming assemblers instead of manufacturers. Then just warehouses and logistics operations. Then nothing.

Everyone knew it was happening, and anyone who tried to stop it was laughed at. They were standing in the way of progress and prosperity.

Ultimately, nobody intervened. Not the government, not the business community, not even the unions until it was too late. It was like watching someone die in a hospital bed while the doctors stood around debating the merits of life. After all, this might be a great thing.

This was America’s DNR order. Do Not Resuscitate. They didn’t murder American manufacturing. That would have required intent, action, decision. Well, actually there was intent. Just not the kind that involves killing. The intent was something else entirely.

The neoliberal vision was that America would become post-industrial. We’d be the world’s managerial class. The designers, the financiers, the ones who owned the brands and controlled the supply chains. Other people would do the actual making. We were too sophisticated, too evolved, too expensive for that. Let China handle manufacturing. Let Vietnam and Bangladesh make our clothes. Let Mexico assemble our cars. We’d keep the high-value work.

Except it turns out you can’t separate knowing how to design things from knowing how to make them. You can’t keep the expertise when you offshore the production. And you definitely can’t assume the people doing the manufacturing will stay in the role you assign them forever.

Big business will tell you we had no choice. That labor costs made competition impossible. That market forces made offshoring inevitable.

That’s only part of the story, and it’s the part that lets us off the hook.

China wasn’t just cheaper. China was investing. Massive investment in new plants, modern machinery, infrastructure, education. They were building and growing. We were extracting what little value was left from plants running equipment from the 1950s and 60s. The presses we used to curve plywood at my plant were built during World War II. My customers were using the same machinery their fathers had installed. Nobody was modernizing. Nobody was investing in the next generation of American manufacturing.

When your competition is building state-of-the-art facilities with modern equipment and training a new generation of engineers, and you’re trying to squeeze another decade out of machines built when Truman was president, the wage gap isn’t your only problem. We chose not to compete. We chose extraction over investment.

And here’s the part that really stings. We handed them everything they needed to beat us. They are using the American System while we try the same things the dying Roman or British Empires did.

We taught them how to make our products. American executives were happy to form partnerships, share designs, show them our processes. The Chinese government wouldn’t let foreigners own factories, so we partnered with Chinese industrialists. We trained them. We showed them how to make furniture, how to make phones, how to make semiconductors, how to build machine tools, how to develop advanced robotics.

Then they did what any rational group of people would do. They learned. They improved. They innovated. They invested their returns into high-speed rail, renewable energy, advanced manufacturing, AI development. Now they’re not just making our stuff cheaper. They’re making better stuff. They’re leading in clean energy technology that will define the next century. They’re building infrastructure at a scale and speed that makes our efforts look like we’re moving in slow motion.

We thought we were being clever. Keep the brains, offshore the hands. Turns out you can’t separate them. The people making the things learn how things work. They see what could be improved. They innovate. And eventually they don’t need the Americans who thought they were irreplaceable.

We told ourselves it was about comparative advantage. Natural specialization. But it was just arrogance wrapped in economic theory. The post-industrial vision assumed we’d stay on top of a hierarchy we created. That the people doing the “low-value” manufacturing would stay there. That knowing how to make things wasn’t actually valuable knowledge.

We were catastrophically wrong.

Now here’s the part that exposes the whole con. They’ll say we couldn’t afford to keep manufacturing here. That the economics didn’t work. That market forces left us no choice

But look at what we’re willing to spend money on. Stock buybacks, inefficient infrastructure building, insane housing costs. Or look at healthcare.

We pour unimaginable sums, trillions and trillions, into systems that don’t work—systems everyone knows don’t work—because those systems enrich the right people. We’ll dump trillions into inefficiencies if it means creating or protecting an ultra-wealthy elite. But manufacturing? That was declared too expensive to save. Not because it was economically impossible, but because the people who owned the factories made more money by moving them. And because nobody with power cared about the communities left behind.

We didn’t offshore manufacturing because it was economically necessary. We did it because a small group of people could get rich doing it, and they’d convinced everyone who mattered that manufacturing was beneath us anyway.

The CHIPS Act is trying to restart a heart that’s been stopped for 30 years. We’re throwing $280 billion at semiconductor manufacturing, but we don’t have the engineers who know how to build fabrication facilities. We don’t have the skilled workers who understand the processes. Intel’s new Ohio facility moved from projected operation in 2024 to 2031. Factories being built in Arizona by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company are years behind schedule.

We used to understand what building meant. During World War II, we didn’t win by having better financial engineering than our enemies. We won by outproducing them. America produced 300,000 aircraft from 1940 to 1945. Ford’s Willow Run plant made one B-24 bomber every hour at peak. We built 86,000 tanks, 94,000 ships. We mobilized 16.4 million Americans for military service.

That’s what government capacity looked like when we decided something mattered. When we believed building things was how you won. When we invested in people who knew how to make things instead of people who knew how to extract value from things other people made.

After the war, we could have kept that capacity. Modernized it. Made it the foundation of permanent prosperity. Instead, we let Wall Street convince us that making things was old economy. That the future was services and information. That we could get rich by getting out of the making business.

Trump promised to restore our capacity, to restore our self-sufficiency, to restore the dignity and reward for work. He’s proven himself a liar in every one of these promises. He’s turned his back on working people. But he’s only the latest in a long line to make these hollow promises. The only thing different is he’s abandoned even the pretense, using government as a vehicle to collect wealth and power for himself and his circle while waving tariffs around like they’re a manufacturing policy.

The people in my hometown voted for him. Mostly because it’s a shell of its former self. Empty factories with grass growing through the parking lots. Main streets where half the stores are boarded up. Entire families living on disability or working while still needing food stamps because there’s so little else.

And the talking heads wonder why people are angry. They wonder why people would vote for that man. Must be racists. Must be sexists. We were too woke. Or maybe it’s because we built an economy that is draining the life out of this country.

Turns out you can’t run a superpower on management consulting and financial services. Turns out the people you teach to manufacture don’t stay stuck at step one. Turns out offshoring production means offshoring knowledge, expertise, and eventually dominance.

Now China makes our antibiotics, our military equipment, our infrastructure components. And we’re surprised we’re vulnerable? We’re shocked other countries have leverage over us?

They didn’t kill the American industry that powered this nation. They just let it die because they thought they knew better. Called it inevitable. Called it efficiency. Like hospice workers with clipboards, making notes while the patient flatlines, nodding along about how peaceful things are.

As a man on a wheelbarrow once said, “I’m not dead yet.” And we aren’t. The capacity is still here. The fire still burns. Americans didn’t forget how to build. We just decided for 40 years that building wasn’t prestigious enough for us. That making things was for other people. That we’d be the managers and financiers while someone else did the actual work.

I hope and I believe this could be a moment for radical transformation. That despite our failures to supply the basics for the overwhelming majority of people in this country, as we flirt with authoritarianism, we might turn from this cliff without needing a Great Depression or world war to force our hand. We can decide how we go forward. We can decide our own future.

The Progressive Era. The New Deal. The Arsenal of Democracy. Americans know how to come together. We how how to transform and thrive. Those legacies remain.

We have the capacity. We’ve always had it. We just have to decide to use it again.

Corbin

This is the third essay in a 12-part series where I lay out how we got to where we are and the next steps required to move forward. You can find the first essay here, and the second essay here. The fourth essay will be published at America’s Undoing on Sunday November 16.

On December 9th I’ll be announcing a new initiative designed to bring power to the people, not the wealthy.

Please join me on the journey by subscribing and sharing, and let me know what you think in the comments.