Respectfully, no. You act like Americans buying stuff on the cheap only benefited the businesses doing it. There were plenty of businesses around and plenty of people that had money to buy from them, that weren’t doing things on the cheap, and people didn’t. “Why pay for my silverware to be made here when I can pay a company that’s oursourced half?”

This isn’t about power, it’s about human greed at all levels of the system. Our government (i.e. the power structure) is what actually was responsible for pushing things back the other way by introducing incentives (i.e. subsidizing doing the right thing) and introducing protected “Made in the USA” labeling. We’re still nowhere near where we were.

Sure you can make the argument that people only buy cheap because they’re not paid well. Again though, that’s not how it was, and even now plenty of people that are paid well, pay for the cheap thing.

And again, some of these people don’t even have running water. Whatever “bad deal” you think Americans have been delt in many cases the countries we outsource to have been cut far far worse deals and have no power structure to fix it.

(To be clear, I love my country, but we’ve got skeletons and I think it’s important to talk about them and try to address them and how we got here. I don’t blame “people in power”, it’s too easy and it’s only part of the problem. We’ve got the wrong mindset as a society, “big, fast, cheap, and more of it”)