Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

1. There is the problem of depending on potential enemies (all others have potential to be enemies) for goods that are critical to the military and/or general economy. Suppliers can threaten to cut supplies. Note that this can happen even if actual shooting war is unlikely; the threat to cut supplies is a brutal negotiating tactic that can block us diplomatically. For example, if we depended on Russia, they could demand that we support the Syrian government.

2. Lots of physical things contain computer chips. He who builds them is in control. Remember when France gave the UK some secret codes to make Argentina's missiles (purchased from France) fail. It's not just military equipment. Consider your Ethernet card and/or motherboard chipset. It could include a hardware debugger with full memory access, controlled by magic packets. What happens when we can only get those from government-owned Chinese companies? What about modern computerized farm equipment that phones home for licensing? If that were foreign, could a foreign power disable our farm equipment at a key time, causing us to face food shortages?

That's what's great about them, because they are there to represent us, and we're all, in most fields other than ours, amateurs.

And also because most experts on economy and industry have private interests to take care off and force upon the rest.

(Well, those private interests also buy politicians, yes, but they always start by buying or directly employing experts).

It's a globally integrated supply chain, and cannot be otherwise. There is no way countries are going back to a blast-furnace-to-car vertically integrated manufacturing world. It costs far too much and you couldn't even do it back when Ford tried it. He needed to import rubber, modern cars need to import chips.

The only non-globalised manufacturing chain is defence, which is instead prohibitively expensive.

Manufacturing is popular because it's percieved as a source of blue-collar jobs. Not only has that declined due to automation, but I think that one of the reasons for the decline in Western manufacturing in the first place was union-busting and labour relations issues. Part of the reason Germany has retained its manufacturing reputation is avoiding that failure mode.

And unfortunately, you have to have someone produce those voting tests. How do you think they will get their positions? Do you think that the tests in states such as Utah will have the same sort of things as tests in California or Vermont? In your version of the system, the politicians have simply changed professions.

Besides, there is actual need for politicians at this point (the AI still seems pretty far out). It is good to have someone to organize large infrastructure projects, good to have folks handle money and dividing it up, overseeing military operations - and it is good to have folks outside some of the industries asking questions and learning and trying different solutions.

Corruption itself won't go away any time soon: The best we've been able to do is minimize it.