Why Manufacturing is Never Coming Back to America

...Well, not the continental US as it exists now.

Many reasons manufacturing is never coming back to America, depicted in red.

Donald Trump wants to bring manufacturing back to America, and while I think that’s potentially a good idea, even at the time it obviously involved annexing new territory, which Trump also was talking about doing. The reason there’s no manufacturing in America anymore is because the only reason there was manufacturing in America in the first place is America was importing all the raw materials, but that wasn’t sustainable. The reason semiconductors are made in Taiwan, for example, is because Taiwan is sitting right on top of the materials to make them, and the continental US is not. Greenland and Canada arguably are, but understandably, Greenland and Canada are in no rush to join a country that’s in trillions of dollars of debt to the PRC, and since they have all the raw materials, it would basically mean they would be enslaved to the modern continental US, which would remain a wasteful consumer society, just the goods would be made in Greenland and Canada instead of the PRC, so technically there would be no debt.

However, the exact reason America is not a major source of rare earth elements is the exact same reason America is famous for cowboys and national parks: volcanoes. This is also the reason Italy stereotypically has better food than the rest of Europe, and the reason New Zealand’s economy is based on agriculture while Australia’s is based on mining. Technically, New Zealand has a lot of “manufacturing” as well, it’s just manufacturing products such as baby formula from milk instead of manufacturing semiconductors, so “manufacturing” economies such as Taiwan and the PRC should really be called mining economies, and if you have volcanoes, you are not going to have a mining economy. If you have bad sunlight and temperatures like Iceland, you have the hot springs and you monetize those instead of farming, though the idea of sheep in Iceland is pretty famous too, because that’s a common result of having volcanoes. Meanwhile, Canada has lots of mining and logging and not much agriculture because Canada has no volcanic activity. Indeed, the Canadian Shield around Labrador and the Australian Shield in western Australia are the Earth’s only two remnants of Precambrian rock because there has been virtually no plate tectonics in either of those areas for billions of years. Labrador was the initial place of discovery of the famous mineral labradorite because Labrador basically has the geology of the Moon and labradorite in areas with volcanoes mostly turns into lava rock (though labradorite as a form of feldspar can grow inside basalt in mafic/basaltic volcanic regions, it’s not as common as in places like Labrador which is just geologically basically the Moon because it’s so tectonically inactive, and also a major mining site for the same reason.)

The mineral labradorite, popular as a collector’s and lapidary specimen, exhibiting the phenomenon of labradorescence.

If the American economy wants to be restored, maybe consider replacing McDonald’s with Old McDonald and bring back farming, not factories, because the continental US has never had enough rare earth elements and similar mineral resources to make that type of manufacturing viable, and Greenland and Canada aren’t going to be eager to join a society that doesn’t have its act together even if Greenland is eager to leave Denmark, which actively stifles its economic growth to make it dependent, and many Canadians actually would love to join the US for cultural reasons, but don’t want to be part of the US due to the horrible economy.