You could also make the opposite argument. If you want to manufacture things in the US, the real estate costs too much because of artificial housing scarcity, the tax system favors international supply chains over domestic ones, the regulatory environment favors large incumbents over small/new companies, etc. And if you make it disfavorable to manufacture things in the US, you create the incentive for corporations to do whatever they have to do to manufacture it somewhere else.

Don't think of corporations as having agency. Think of them like beasts that have to be herded into the field where you want them. If all your cows are in the neighbor's field, it's not the cows that you should blame and yelling at the cows is not going to help you.

You're speaking my language. Incentive-based programming of behavior drives optimization for rewards. For example, giant anticompetitive firms dominating our economies create corporate environments that shape executives to prioritize short-term profits by exploiting their undue influence to inflate their own compensation. This behavior depletes natural wealth, sacrifices long-term opportunities to more competitive firms abroad, and even jeopardizes their companies’ sustainability. Boeing and Intel are prime examples of how executives optimizing for short-term gains leave behind destructive long-term legacies.

Governments, too, create regulatory, taxation, and broader economic frameworks that influence incentives and shape behavior.

I feel like the biggest problems are legislative incompetence and corruption. You have people proposing laws without considering how people will respond to them, or choosing a "compromise" authored by the perpetrators of the original offense.

People say things like "corporate profits are too high, we need to tax them more" but the actual reasons corporate profits are high are lax antitrust enforcement and regulatory capture and the proposed tax increase would apply predominantly to domestic businesses, increase the incentives for offshoring and create even more advantage for large international corporations. But tax increases are popular in Washington because then they get more money to transfer to cronies, so it keeps getting proposed as a "solution" instead of solving the actual problems.

I actually wrote an article that you might be interested in. It connects competition policy, market power, and social unrest. If you’re interested, feel free to take a look -- I’d be happy to hear your thoughts. https://thecommongoodchronicles.substack.com/p/an-assassinat...

Higher taxes for the absurdly rich/corporations could be a good start if the money was put to good use, but taxes ultimately don't solve the underlying issue.

I agree that the core issue is antitrust policy -- and it doesn't have to be this way and wasn't always like this. After the Great Depression, antitrust enforcement ushered in an economic golden age during the 1950s and 60s, boosting prosperity across all socioeconomic groups and lifting lower-income groups the fastest by enhancing competition and preventing concentrations of market power.

Later, regulators embraced 'trickle-down economics' and 'corporate efficiencies,' enabling the rise of giant firms that overpower governments and laws. This shift has led to historically low profits, stagnant growth, declining productivity, and soaring income inequality.

Now the rules-based systems have been co-opted by these giant firms that exploit their market power to subvert democracy and shape laws to serve their interests (and further entrench their undue influence) at the expense of society.

> Unprecedented inequality has unleashed volcanic forces beneath society’s fragile surface, threatening to erupt in violent social unrest. Corporations and elites have exploited workers, unchecked, for so long and to such an extreme degree that the masses, consumed by contempt, are now cheering the execution of a CEO.

I think this is missing a piece.

Corporations and the government are together as a corrupt system (_______ industrial complex etc.) and then people get mad about it, but many of the problems are structural (i.e. insufficient checks and balances against corruption) so you can't put the blame on any specific person or just replace one evil CEO or Senator and be solved. But that's what people want -- a personified enemy to fight, a simple solution -- so it's what demagogues offer them. They tell them to blame the CEO because it gives people a target for their ire, when the actual problem is that you have to change -- and in order to do that, first understand -- the structures that led things to be this way.

But most people don't have time to read a thousand page healthcare bill to figure out just what's in it that causes things to be this way, so when some talking heads tell them to be mad at the CEOs, they get mad at the CEOs. Which doesn't fix the problem, and that only makes them even madder.

> Afterwards, I worked at the intersection of data science and antitrust law to support collective action litigations.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that employer-based labor unions are useless.

When the employer is in a competitive market, the employer already has little to give in negotiations because the competition is already forcing them to give anything they don't give to labor as wages to customers (i.e. also labor) as competitive prices.

When the employer is a monopolist, at best the union is going to extract part of the monopoly rent, but not all of it, and the monopolist's customers who aren't also employees are still getting screwed. Meanwhile that union then has the perverse incentive to defend the monopoly rather than trying to destroy it, because they're getting part of the monopoly rent, which is a disaster.

Conversely, suppose that local land owners are conspiring to capture zoning boards to keep housing prices high and screwing over local laborers who then can't afford to buy and have to pay high rents. Is unionizing the property management companies going to solve this? Of course not, they wouldn't even be representing most of the people being screwed over and their expected behavior would be to try to negotiate higher wages for the property management employees etc. rather than advocating for zoning reform.

Which hints at what people should be doing instead: Political organizing. Not for a party, but for issues. Get all the tenants and the would-be homeowners who are stuck living with their parents together to pay dues to an organization to oppose politicians who resist zoning reform. Get them out of office. Publish voter guides and use the dues to buy political advertising. Do the same thing for trust busting and getting rid of certificate of need laws etc.

Because that's the problem. Monopolists and the corporations siphoning tax dollars out of the corrupt government are doing this, and you're not.

the real problem is this poorly planned effort to make the US a manufacturing nation via political fiat in the face of all reason rather than accepting economic realities about comparative advantage in manufacturing

The US was once a manufacturing powerhouse and, in theory, could become one again. Working-class people understandably want their jobs back, and you can’t blame them for being taken in by false promises to bring those jobs back.

But the harsh reality is that creating a regulatory, taxation, and broader economic landscape attractive to manufacturing would inevitably threaten elites and firms at the top of the economic hierarchy. While there’s nothing wrong with that -- in fact, it’s likely healthy for the economy -- it won’t happen[1]. Those elites and anticompetitive firms abuse their undue influence to subvert democracy and shape laws in order to further entrench their market power.

[1] Or more precisely, it won't happen soon. It's pretty clear that the era we're in is coming to an end but change will likely be slow unless there's a surprise shock to the system.