A Robotics War? America Literally Can’t Compete
Even the contradictions in MAGA’s vision to restore manufacturing at home will be irrelevant given China’s advantages in the ongoing economic war.
MAGA’s vision for the return of a manufacturing-based economy takes two distinct, and contradictory, forms.
In one version, the swelling ranks of the unemployed—especially furloughed federal workers—are supposed to turn screws on iPhones for subsistence wages. I shared a story recently that vivifies what that looks and feels like (it’s terrible). But it’s not a fiction: Commerce Secretary Howard Luttnick said specifically:
The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—that kind of thing is going to come to America.
The second vision for manufacturing is the opposite—essentially the joke/utopia of “fully automated luxury communism.” Howard Luttnik, interestingly, has also gestured at this:
What’s going to happen is robotics are going to replace the cheap labor…
The first vision is a dystopia that depends on expanding unemployment to serve as a source of surplus (cheap) labor. It creates jobs; slave jobs. The second vision does not create jobs—and would in fact take jobs from the global South—but at any rate depends on automated factories run by robots.
While neither vision is the least bit appealing, the latter is literally impossible in a world where the US wages an economic war against China. To help explain why, the Financial Times has a rich piece explaining that Asia has the US over a barrel when it comes to the robots that make factory automation possible: