Tea Party membership driven by white people who hate brown people, sez science

[The Grand Nudger]

Manual labor will be automated in next 20 years.

Won;t make much of a blip in wealth for the individual. Manual labor can already be had for pennies, the only reason to automate it is to avoid liability. Which is reason enough, of course. IDK if it will happen in 20 years, but eventually, yeah. Skilled labor will go the way of the dodo as well.

But who cares, are the machine making the machines yet? No? You'll have to forgive me...your criticism of someone else's utopian fantasy contains within it an invocation of your own fantasies? Sigh.

America doesn't really need resources it needs means of production.

Then explain why we consume such a vast amount of them? I think you're going to need to reassess that claim. America goes through the lions share of the -entire earths- resources...imagining that we don't need resources relative to production ignores both our consumption and the number of manufacturing houses that go out of business due to lack of available contracts, or the inability to source the required materials competitively. I don't feel like explaining the relationship between resources and production and how you can ameliorate the cost of an item by selling the materials to an outsourced producer willing to manufacture at a pricepoint lower than your own. I'll just say this. If someone in China wants to make shoes for a penny on the dollar, let them make the shoes - if you can sell them the resources fantastic. The very reason that we produce things elsewhere is that we often find that others are willing to let go of their resources for much less than we would (and this includes the capacity for human productivity as well as things like raw materials). The connection between resource stewardship and the wealth or strength of a nation is made plainly apparent in a discussion like this one. If we need the factories we can build them (and as long as someone else does it cheaper we simply don't need them). We can't just "make" the resources (even if we did suddenly find a need, but we won't..because we already have that need - nothing sudden about it).

Any discussion of wealth or the strength of a nation that includes "we really don;t need resources" has gone off the rails, killing all passengers aboard.