For some time I've been struggling with my alignment with strong free market economists of the 50s-90s like Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell and the obvious downsides of "deindustrialization." I don't want to nail Friedman on a single talk , but his statement that "you don't want to be sending out more than you take in" seems completely at odds with being economically productive. That's the basis of economic productivity: a farmer sends out far more than he gets in return, but he lives off a margin of what he creates.
But starting in the 80s we started exporting industries themselves. Friedman would argue that exporting our textile industry merely freed up our country to produce more valuable products, so it was a win. Then went our heavy industries and from almost the beginning we paid to create our semiconductor ICs and related things in SE Asia (ultimately China). Ok that's fine? We're being freed up for more valuable industries, right? Except that's not the case; we're now a "services economy."
As far as I can tell a "services economy" produces nothing but add generation platforms. Every fucking "tech" idea for the past 15 years is about extracting value from the shrinking bits of the productive economy (with much funny money to keep things going)?
So I have two opposing questions for the economics nerds. 1) Are guys like Friedman and Sowell right about global trade, ie bring me back to the team Milton Friedman. 2) If I wanted to start a communist revolution and seize the means of production, is there anything left to seize?
There is not and will never be a truly free international market. Free trade works well within the confines of the nation, but purist libertarianism without discernment is as flawed as anything else.
As vicious-snek pointed out, there are nations that use economics as a form of warfare. And for the general benefit of the country we have some standard labor laws, while shitholes use slave labor. There will always be downsides to protectionism as well, but economics should be considered as part of national security, and national industry thus protected to a degree.
We can have free trade with things like entertainment, but our farms and local manufacturing capacity need to be supported. None of our military hardware should be made in China, for example. Taking protectionism too far is also a problem, but we need a certain level of it to preserve the capacity for local industry, and the ability to expand that capacity rapidly.
For another example, oil. Should we not buy oil from the middle east? It's a limited resource, if we can exploit them we should, because it preserves our own stores - but we should produce enough that our own local industry is functional and capable of expanding to meet our needs wholly if necessary.