The coronavirus crash has turned the fact that we don't make anything in America anymore from a topic for philosophical and political debate into a crisis in our hospitals causing people to die and endangering our frontline health care workers.

Even worse, there's nothing to catch us as and after we fall, because we don't have a manufacturing base to fall back on like we did the last time a crisis like this happened-in the late 1930s.

Most of our medical supplies and prescription drugs now come from China, for example, and that's producing a crisis in our hospitals because China isn't exporting N95 masks, ventilators and respirators like they were just six months ago.

Back in the day, the British knew that manufacturing was the core strength of a nation, which is why they forbade the colonists in 1770 from manufacturing most items that could be imported from Britain, and famously forbade the good people of India from even turning their own cotton into cloth and clothing (thus Gandhi's spinning wheel as a logo for protest).

Read more here.

-Thom