>>17274
You have no power over the rules of comparative advantage. You only have to power to guard people from the global economy. If the costs of business are cheaper elsewhere, foreign investment will go elsewhere. Unless you attempt to punish them, domestic entrepreneurs will also go elsewhere. You can force local consumers to buy domestically, sure, but that means higher costs and consequently higher prices. "Protected" jobs are never free, they are always sustained by the higher consumer prices that all consumers (private and industrial) have to shoulder.
>could restore the American standard of living
I have no reason to believe this will ever come back. Gilded America was built on mass industry, mass production and mass exports. This was made possible by an environment which then couldn't be found elsewhere. Today, globally, people are increasingly fitter, more literate and more professional. Times have changed.
> Mass Production requires Mass Consumption and the wages of the workers create demand.
> The demand for goods creates jobs.
> Great Industrialists. like Ford, knew this. Ford paid he workers in his first factory twice the going rate.
> Paying your workers well does cut into profits but it's good for the economy, and that's good for the long term goals of the company.
I love this! If you don't pay workers whatever exorbitant rate they demand, you're anti-economic growth. Where does it end? If deliberately increasing your expenses is supposed to provide some long term economic return to the industrialist, why stop at labour? Surely, he should spend as much as he can afford if his expense is proportional to his long term profit.
There is also the problem of diminishing marginal returns but you don't even need to go there. Not even the kind of person this pasta was made for is stupid enough not to see through it.