On Sun, 30 Oct 2011 08:40:54 -0400, BAR wrote:

Be careful what you ask for. A lot of things that we now buy for
half way reasonable prices would double or triple in price if made in
the US (at current wage rates). Some things might become totally
unavailable because the manufacturing expertise for certain products
does not exist here. A lot of the best engineering talent in the US
has been siphoned of by the military/aerospace industries.

The military/aerospace industries, through the ages, have provided us
with quit a few useful things.

The first that comes to mind is the Roman road system.

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Heh, good example. The Romans however did not have a domestic
manufacturing industry to maintain and expand. I'd be the first to
defend the space program also. Not only is it the right thing to do
scientifically but the technology fallout has been enormous as you
suggest. Our *really* hi-tech manufacturing is doing just fine also.
It's the nuts and bolts assembly industries that manufacture consumer
appliances, tools, industrial machinery, etc. that have not really
kept up. Look at the automobile industry as an example. It's easy
to blame their problems on the unions but it runs much deeper than
that. One of our friends here in Florida is a retired senior engineer
from Ford. He has some very interesting stories to tell about how
Ford had to send teams of engineers to Japan and reverse engineer a
lot of asian automobiles to learn the secrets of how to build high
quality vehicles. Mostly it was a management failure but it has been
quite a while since the best and brightest engineers in this country
have been all that interested in building cars.