Bringing Jobs Home?

There is a growing movement to repatriate manufacturing industries back from China. It isn’t just America that is doing it. Japan also has earmarked vast sums of money to bring their manufacturing back home. Aside from the notorious apparent lack of quality control in Chinese factories, the desire is to shorten the supply chain: produce the goods where they will be consumed.

I don’t see this as creating many new domestic jobs. I think it will be an impetus to automation. In the meantime, China will want to find new jobs for laid-off workers. This is a huge problem for the CCP who have to keep workers employed so that there is no Chinese version of the Arab Spring. China traditionally throws easy money into its economy so that companies can grow bigger and bigger, producing more and more. But this requires markets, so China largely reserves its domestic markets for its own production, while at the same time trying to infect other nations’ markets with its junk.  China covets markets. The CCP needs the markets because they need the jobs. Bringing production back to America and to Japan implies those countries satisfying their own consumptive demands and greatly reducing their dependence on China.

I hope Canada sees the wisdom of domestic production. I think it is a shame and a testimony to the short-sightedness of our leaders that we can’t even produce the protective gear needed for the current pandemic and are relying on China instead. The Canadian way is to pay people to stay home. Give a guy $2000 per month, and another $2000 monthly to his live-in girlfriend, and then be surprised that employers can’t find workers for $25 per hour. How stupid our policies sometimes are!