I don't get trying to save outdated jobs.
The world's moving to automation. More and more self checkout stands than emoyees... Lyft and Uber are pushing the taxi industry out.. We didn't stop auto manufacturers from producing cars to save the horse and carriage jobs, did we?
A more relatable one... All signs used to be hand painted. It's fun to reminisce on it... But can we honestly say we're not better off with digital printers and plotters? Should we have put huge tarrifs on Japanese graphtecs in order to save hand painters jobs?
If another country can supply something for cheaper... Let them and focus on other exports / products. It doesnt make sense to put huge tarrifs on products and make everyone pay a tax on aluminum, to save a couple hundred jobs... Better to retrain and focus on a different venue.
It's all moot anyways. In 20-30 years 99% of jobs will be automated. Humans jobs will be to Maintain machines and do the odd job a robot can't do. That's what we should,be focusing on fixing... It's inevitable and will happen, and so far there's no plan on how to fix it besides a few guaranteed min income trials going on in Canada.
You're adding an additional complexity on the subject when adding automation into the discussion.
With aluminum/steel it's really not about automation. We had several things happening at once. Some of the main reasons that those industries died over time were labor costs, regulations (mostly environmental but some OSHA stuff), and an expanding global economy. The Chinese gov't stepped in and said "we want to get into this industry. Here's unlimited funds. Go do it." That's an unreal advantage over what was going on in America.
The US population fell asleep on this one. They just said "screw it, send all this work overseas. We're going to save bundles!" They didn't think of the long term effect. They didn't think about how China is a world power because the US funded it. They didn't think about destroying the working class of America. They didn't think about how China didn't care about workers conditions or the environment. They just cared about saving money. We've failed at being a responsible capitalist society. Big picture, we've adapted a far more sociopathic capitalistic society. Profits above everything else has not benefited the American population.
Working it back to automation, within the next 50 years, we'll likely have the technology to implement a lot of really efficient automation. The question will be: Are we better off because of it? If you have a plant full of robots replacing 500 employees and you just have 50 support staff, unless you have jobs for those other 450 people, you're likely not making a good choice. It's going to be a similar situation to the "should we outsource or keep making in America?" question we faced in the 70's. There is no clear answer one way or another, but there is a general consensus that the majority of Americans aren't happy with the end result of that decision. Approximately 40% of the population want to rewind the clocks to a time where the American worker was valued and had a job and career that allowed them to provide reasonably well for their family. The "other" 40% of the population doesn't want to rewind the clock, but is equally dissatisfied with the end result as they believe while outsourcing may not be a bad thing, we did not do it responsibly so that the working class can also benefit from the massive savings the ultra wealthy and major corporations have. Essentially 80% of the population agrees that we screwed it up, but sadly we can't agree on much after that.
