I’m not entirely sure what you’re saying… are you saying that making things that require a large well-paid educated and skilled labor force is the same/better than a service job economy that requires only a low-skilled low-educated low-paid labor force?
As for me, I prefer the former. And as we’re seeing in the shortages and dependencies we have on other countries (such as China and Germany) for things ranging from masks to medical equipment to microchips to whole factories, we’re beggars.
And when people in this country throw around words like “socialism” it seems to be an excuse for our failures to have a decent, fair, productive, high tech and politically clean society. In short, it is for those who feel the need to resort to name-calling rather than looking at realities, particularly when you look at the metrics of everything from educational levels to average lifespan, drug addiction, mental health, suicides, crime, etc. The USA is at the bottom education and lifespan and the leader of in all the others compared to the “socialist countries” of Europe. And Europe has for a long time now been taking in much higher numbers of refugees and immigrants per capita than the USA.
As for per capita military spending… How that is calculated is in the particulars of a defense budget. So in Germany’s case, that leaves out all the costs of the bases (air, sea, land) there for US/NATO troops, the salaries of civilians and infrastructure, etc. During the cold war when Germany was a front state, it also excluded all the physical infrastructure that was hardened against attack, Interestingly, in this latter case, Germany at the time was faulted in a McInsey Global Report for being an inefficient user of capital because it put all its electrical grid and its water, sewer, fuel piping underground in cement conduits. Of course they omitted the requirement that it had to survive not only attacks from the east but also tank traffic.
And Germany had compulsory military service until July 2011 for all males. The USA ended June 1973.
But, most of all, the U.S. has a hidden socialist industrial policy: it’s called NATO weapons systems. Or just plainly the U.S. Defense economy, the most economically and technically sophisticated part of our industrial economy, subsidized by NATO. The most outstanding example of this is the compulsory purchase by NATO members of the F-35.
These are the facts. No rhetoric or ideology. If you measure things as they really are because you have all the information, as I always say: The USA is heavyweight that punches for its people like a bantam weight.
