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?
Regarding "means of production": the dirty lie is that, at the most atomic level, the means of production is the individual. Specifically, one's time and skills, and, by extension, their assets. If they really meant it, they would abolish all forms of income tax, sales tax, and property tax, and cut the red tape.
What the communists are selling is more akin to theft; take the assets of individual owners (including corporate ownership), through tax, force, or oversight, and put it under government control. The second dirty lie is that the government is an altruistic public institution. It should be painfully obvious, by now, that that is rarely the case.