I mean, if there is physical capacity to make things - workforce, machinery, materials, know-how - that capacity can be 100% utilized to produce social benefits, as needed. There are no material factors that prevent the full deployment of that capacity, at least in principle. Wojtek
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Good God, man, that would be communism! It is against all that is holy, against all we god fearing Americans have fought against all our lives.
Well never mind. I just got a job funded by the evil United States government which accidently just did what you suggest, i.e. the stimulus money. Nevermind this half time job will save me from going into debt on a credit card and end up homeless, living in my truck and cashing my Social Security check at a rip-off check cash store.
What's my job? Building an alternative service delivery system for disabled people who are falling down busted because the privatized services they must endure no longer work without long delays, inadequate services, low paid angry workers, and all the quiet violence of a broken welfare safety net.
It's not going to last more than two years, but two years is a long time these days. I just worked at spending more than twelve thousand dollars on tools and equipment. Unfortunately, only a few hundred of those thousand went to US manufacturers with real American workers. Most of that money went to the US manufacturer trade names, which are actually Chinese fronts with a US logo. So the US workers didn't get much out of it. The off shoring jobs in this particular trade are universally produced in China. So if you follow the money, the profits went to the US manufacturing logo, and the jobs went to China.
This is precisely why Obama took the CEO of General Electric to Beijing as part of his `jobs' program. And guess what GE makes? Big very expensive things like giant medical imaging systems used in hospitals where a single run can easily cost over two grand. And they also make nuclear power plants.
Go back and think where those jobs should have been and you see the rust belt and rot of the Midwest where Milwaukee, DeWalt, Rockwell, Delta, Skill, Black and Decker, Snap-on, Mac, Proto, Craftsmen, and all the others used to make our tools. Now they are all Chinese subcontract operations, collectively owned by a Japanese front, Ryobi who distributes them with US logos and designs. The outside might look different, but the inside guts are pretty much the same.
What's the real problem with China? Their mining, casting, and forgings all suck. This means the casting of their stationary power tools break and you are fucked. It means the quality of the copper and cast iron which are used in electric motors all suck. The armatures burn out and you are fucked. The list goes on and on. Now China is perfectly capable of producing quality, but at a higher price. That price usually means something near what the older US manufacturers were trying to escape when they moved their suppliers and out sourced their actual manufacturing overseas.
So the bottom line is that the US at my level of knowledge, no longer has the manufacturing facilities and capacity to produce what it needs. The neoliberal economic cancer has eaten us from the inside out.
An here is the real irony. I got most of this background information from an old contractor who had fallen on hard times and went to work at the Emeryville Home Depot. He was in the tool section and we got to talking about how come Milwaukee tools looked so shitty these days...
CG