Me either.

Market forces are going to cause jobs and industry to flow to where the costs are lowest. That's the naked truth. You can try to short out the mechanism, but it will route around it.

Trade barriers will temporarily protect your own manufacturing, if your country has a large enough customer base, but the rest of the planet will buy the cheaper stuff. Pretty soon you're selling only to yourself, or your industries have devolved into protected, subsidized, glass-bubble exotic plants like the Japanese beef industry.

The thing I've never been able to get across here is that market principles are not an option, like picking what color to paint your house. They are a reality, and you can try to work up systems and methods that recognize it, or not.

Your indictment of how America handled this is based on a fantasy. There is no mythical "Other Way" we could have taken where somehow we could have preserved all of our American manufacturing capacity while paying our workers an order of magnitude more than what the same work would pay in dozens of other nations. There is no real-world course CEOs, labor, or government "should" have taken to create this impossible paradise.

The Chinas and Koreas don't have a magic answer either. They will "thrive" for as long as it takes for the next tier down to underprice them. As these countries became more prosperous, their labor costs rose, too. Look up the problems they're starting to have with countries like Indonesia.

We came out of World War II as the only major nation on the entire planet that either wasn't in ruins or wallowing under an ancient subsistence economy. We enjoyed the benefits of that for years, but the economic pressure could not be held back forever. There is a Great Leveling going on, and it's going to take a lot of time to settle out.

The crappy part is that it isn't only manufacturing. Countries like India are getting to the point of eating our lunch in professional fields. Our education system isn't getting the job done, but that's another story.