Originally Posted by MarkG

But it matters less and less every year. Today, if an American wants something made, there's no need to find someone in America to do it, they can just send the design to China and have the Chinese company send the results back to them. There are lots of tiny companies which do that already, for the parts they can't make on a CNC machine or 3D printer.

Tomorrow, they'll skip the whole China business and just make it at home.

And decentralization of production inevitably leads to the decline of centralized power. If you need a giant factory to make stuff, the people in Washington can do a lot to help you make that factory work, and there's a strong incentive to favour a big, centralized government and to go-along-to-get-along with people you don't much like but need to work with in your factory. If you get all your stuff from China, or build it in your basement, there's little that people in Washington can do for you other than get in the way, and you no longer have to care about people you don't like.

The whole post-WWII compromise between left and right was based on the belief that we'd be better off by working together, because we could build bigger factories and make more stuff. And that's increasingly no longer the case.

Hence the rapidly-accelerating breakdown of American society, with Canada and the EU not far behind.

I specified the West, because I know a lot more about Western countries than I do about any others, and I didn't want someone to say 'what about Wazakistan, eh?' And pretty much the whole of the west is faux post-industrial at this point, they just have lots of factories to make stuff to send to America.