Sad but true.. My grandfather was a building contractor. Long ago he would go the union hiring hall because that was where the most skilled workers could be found. Things have changed and not for the better.

Not if there is the option of hiring the millions here illegally who will work for less.

Don't know why I missed this when I was logged on earlier today, but your statement: "Expecting "the education system to produce these skills" is to reduce human beings to factory outputs. I am sure that you did not intend that kind of a Soviet view of the problem." is condescending and ridiculous. When I was in the 9th grade high school back in the '60s we went through what was referred to as "exploratory shops" as a regular part of our HS education. Each shop only took 1 or 2 periods in the morning or afternoon and we took one shop for roughly 3 or 4 weeks each throughout the school year totaling 8 or 9 shops by the time the year ended. There were shops for a wide range of skills and we got to pick which ones we wanted to attend. There were exploratory shops for textiles, welding, machine, electrical, sheet metal, automotive, wood, and a bunch more. By the time I got out of 9th grade I had a good idea of how to run a sewing machine, lathe, milling machine, band saw, wire a house, tear apart and reassemble a gasoline engine, build a mold and pour parts made of molten aluminum, and a whole lot more. Along with all that was a rudimentary understanding of the theory behind each skill. Grades 10-12 you could pick what you wanted (I chose electronic theory), but those little exploratory shops gave me skills and understanding I'd use for the rest of my life. All of that is gone now and the high schools offer none of it as far as I can tell. What a loss!!!! It seems today the HS kids can recite the latest PC bromides and paraphrase Karl Marx but don't know the difference between a wrench and a screwdriver (or how to use either) and can barely balance a checkbook. And that is called "education"... BS.

Manufacturing is NOT a service. Basic economics. Manufacturers produce a physical product, push it out the door, and make another. Say cars. The mechanic who works on your car produces nothing physical, and thus provides a service. This is the distinction. Manufacturing requires one set of skills, while service requires quite another.

Manufacturing is kind of a service that used to be performed by humans but is increasingly being performed by robots now

Maybe other things we commonly call services will be performed by robots in the future too, like cashiers, order takers, waitresses, etc. truly creative things may eventually be taken over more and more by robots that learn on their own. In the meantime we humans have to compete with each other and robot science to remain visble

Your argument assumes that all human beings are rational. I think you know otherwise. And I put it to you that military security demands that any country preserve a core of resource-based industrial capacity that will help it withstand siege.

I've used an ATM maybe 4 or 5 times since they were invented. I prefer a live teller at the bank.

With all due respect, the points made in my original post on this are right on target, and portray a situation that is all too prevalent today.
After World War II, American manufacturing was the envy of the world. My father worked at GE's Appliance Park in Louisville, KY, which at one time employed over 22,000 workers in three shifts around the clock, and was the largest appliance manufacturing plant in the world. Wages there were good for the time, and enabled everyone working there to buy a refrigerator, or stove or air conditioner produced there. Today that plant is all but closed, with only about 500 jobs remaining, as most of the jobs there have been shipped to Mexico. Thanks NAFTA.
And why did this happen? Corporate greed, pure and simple. And the same has happened in virtually every industry in the US. Look at Detroit, the world leader in auto production 50 years ago. Japanese and Korean auto makers didn't kill off the jobs there. Their entry into the market reduced the Big 3's market share to be sure, but the greatest impact on Detroit has been due to auto makers shipping their jobs to foreign countries for low wages, fewer government regulations, and bigger profit margins.
Not all of the workers in Detroit in its heyday were "educated" as we think of it today. Ford imported workers from Eastern Europe by the thousands, trained them in their jobs, and even set up mandatory English classes for them to learn the language. But all Detroit auto makers hired and trained local labor, most of whom did not have much beyond an 8th grade education, if that.
Today corporations do not hire such people, unless their business involves fast food, yard maintenance, cleaning services, or similar. Even then, these workers are competing with the cheaper, often under the table, labor of illegal aliens, mostly from Mexico and Latin America. Don't believe it? Just look at the construction industry that I worked in for 40 years. 75-80% of workers on most large job sites today are illegals working for contractors or sub-contractors. The American tradesmen who used to have these jobs are nowhere to be found. On one job I worked on that employed 400 construction workers, word got out that ICE would be visiting the site the following day. 300 of the 400 workers called in sick the next day. FACT!
My call for a return to manufacturing in the US is no call for a return to the 1500s. Yes, there is a need for tradesmen in this country. In fact, there is a shortage of tradesmen. But everybody has been told for so long that the only way to get ahead is with a college degree that the $25/hr carpentry or plumbing jobs go wanting for lack of applicants. And if American companies can pull out of Cleveland (I know there was no iPhone plant there), move their plant to China, and train Chinese workers to produce iPhones (which is what Apple has actually done), then why can't Apple go to Marietta GA, or Compton, CA, or Zanesville OH, and train the locals there how to make them? Again, lower wages and less government regulation.
Jobs by manufacturers like Apple, where a worker can be trained into a well paying job is the key to getting the American people back to work, especially those with limited education or job skills. Bringing these jobs back can be done, but we must decide if we want jobs, or do we want to reduce emissions from 0.03 parts per billion to 0.02 parts per billion.
Finally, the issue of 45% of Americans being on food stamps is not only NOT a different problem, it is the very result of McJobs NOT being able to pay a wage that people - especially those with limited education and skills - can pay their bills and feed their families on. Our corporate culture has decided that if they cannot hire workers at minimum wage (and they can't as long as government benefits amount to more than any minimum wage job), then they will hire illegals who will work for less than minimum wage, or if they are manufacturers will ship their jobs overseas where they only pay $5 a day or less for labor.
I am no socialist. But I am sick to death of corporations who say that their dividends and the price of their stock is their only concern, and those who work for them (or the country) be damned. I know that's the case because I worked for big corporations whose view was precisely that.

I believe the notion of workers being able to buy what they produced was pioneered by Henry Ford as he paid his workers high wages at the time so they could buy a car produced at the plant where they worked. Storo above is far more right than he is wrong. Just because a worker at Boeing is highly unlikely to buy a 747 on his wages doesn't negate the gist of what Storo is trying to convey.

As much as I agree with your sensibilities, I have to recognize the tremendous value of cities, especially megacities. (I reviewed a BBC program on Megacities on my blog here: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20... )

The primary driver for the creation of the modern city was migration from the country. (The first cities were successful hunting camps. In their abundance, they began growing grains but needed more room for it, so farming was taken out of the city. See Jane Jacobs on The Economy of Cities. Cities did not evolve from farming villages. Also, it still continues, actually. I wrote a paper on farming within megacities today for a graduate geography class.)

The point of that here is that your view of their poverty is relative to your own wealth. They have a better life than they would on farms, otherwise, they would leave the city. Few people do that. I

I also believe that people are the most precious resource on the planet. It is hard to imaging how there could be "too many." At then end of the last ice age, a tribe of 300 might have a genius born once every three generations. Progress is much faster now because we have numerically more geniuses.

Manufacturing actually generates more than "tangible items". It is a repository of the wealth of skills and knowledge and provides an environment for invention and creativity. America losing its manufacturing facilities may prove as bad as if America lost its universities. Are there many Americans left who know how empirically to mass produce textiles?

I understand the sentiment, and I shared it with a colleague today, or he shared it with me. He is a multi-millionaire (which I surely am not) and he is almost 60. But he still hides from his parents the fact that he has a gardner. "The way I was raised, if you spent money with this hand, you had something to show for it in the other hand." His parents expect him to mow his own lawn -- and he does that sometimes because he likes it, but it is not an effective use of his time, and he knows that. That's why he has a gardner.

When you buy a service, you are buying back the most precious thing on Earth: your own time. It is like pushing the grave a little bit farther back.

Also, I know what you intended in the vernacular sense of "intrinsic value." But there is no such thing. All values are relative and set by the buyer. The most exquisite vase has no value if no one wants it.

Well, how about vending machines? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vending...) We think nothing of printers connected to computers, but what happened to the actual guys with ink and little lead letters? Could you imagine a society with millions of such printers? Or street corner arithmeticians in the absence of the calculators that are now built into our phones -- phones which replaced messengers... When I set up my telescope in the back yard, I use my phone for its compass and level features, displacing a licensed surveyor from a job...

The public library is a service. It replaces a market in buying and reselling books, re-wholesaling and re-retailing repeatedly. And my wife prefers to borrow ebooks, which are wholly immaterial, but a valuable service nonetheless. And the unemployed book reader person who comes to your home never had a chance...

When you read a book, or watch an informative video on YouTube, you are gaining the service of the knowledge discovered by others so that you do not need to literally reinvent the wheel and everything else in your life.