They're not robbing us blind. They're taking care of our manufacturing so that we can invest in things like the financial industry, fossil fuels, and AI.

Trade happens because both sides agree and make an exchange. I don't understand how "other countries rob us blind."

> The US has hardly any factories left.

Feel free to start your own factory in US, nobody is stopping you. Just keep in mind that for commoditized products (most consumer stuff, for example), prices are all that matter. "Buy American" is not a product feature.

> Maybe letting other countries rob us blind is worse.

I find this argument interesting because the US economy is the largest in the entire world by a fairly wide margin. That the US is being robbed implies it's operating from a position of weakness, which is an absurd idea.

Are other countries with factories really responsible for US companies outsourcing manufacturing to them? Do you want cheap goods or do you want your fellow Americans paid pennies?

No, we're robbing them blind. We used "free trade" to dump subsidized agricultural goods into countries, destroy their farmers, then buy up their farms. We used it to push wages down both here and overseas so that our poor got poorer, and so in other countries they couldn't take advantage of the work to improve their lives, just inflate the incomes of a bunch of elite middle men.

The international monetary system as envisioned by Keynes was supposed to use a central world bank and settlement currency (the Bancor) to make sure that strong countries couldn't be parasitic on weak countries. This was sabotaged by a US official who was also working as a Soviet spy, Harry Dexter White. Neither pole of the new postwar bipolar order wanted anything that would limit their dominance.

The long-term outcome, however, was that the poverty of the world was much more attractive to exploit than the workers of the US, the consumer base for all of this production was left to deteriorate - to shrink to just the wealthy whose income came from investments, as all production shifted overseas.

Everything would have gone great if it weren't for those dastardly Chinese, who didn't let oligarchs shape their economy, and planned for the well-being of China, not their own personal well-being. Western oligarchs were going for a slave planet controlled by the largest bank accounts; this required no competition because it had (and desired) few real assets. China cultivated a manufacturing powerhouse, perfected its infrastructure, and operated from a base of actual, controlled domestic capital.

The West is now stuck trying to trade paper, and manufacturing whose only value is the poverty surrounding it, for Chinese goods. Now they're going to treat the US like the US treated Mexico. Manufacturing will come back in the US, owned by the Chinese.

Tariffs and the well-being of US workers are the only way out of this. Elite Americans will do anything but this, because they are 1) bad people, and 2) barely American.

Who exactly is robbing you blind? Could it be your own billionaire class?