Even things made in America were in short supply during the pandemic because workers were hard to come by as well. A factory isn’t any good if half the people to run it are sick, but it doesn’t take special training to hand out boxes of gloves.
Who cares about silly stuff like health emergencies, the climate catastrophe or war. Number must go up!
Markets will make you climb a hill ignoring it ends on a cliff end
Not only are many individual agents aligned with short term interests they often either can't because they will be pushed out by short term thinkers or literally benefit from net harm to all. America mostly being composed of the rich not the masses voting with their wallets.
The problem is it's an optimizing function for the rich getting richer, not for the good of society, not for reducing human suffering, not even, y'know, the survival of the human race.
Also, "climate catastrophe" is not a thing.
It takes a deep ideological commitment to close ones eyes to the reality in front of us.
Our planet is literally dying.
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w
[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...
[4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...
Obviously the planet won't die. The current biodiversity and the civilization depending on it however might.
In my country, streets are literally melting now, because they were never built for temperatures this high. We had 5000 heat deaths within 2 weeks. Temperatures never seen before in almost 250 years of consistent measurements of weather and temperature.
It's bad. And the data is available for everybody, including you, to see.
E.g. here, they've got tons of raw data available too (german): https://www.dwd.de/DE/leistungen/zeitreihen/zeitreihen.html
Don't know what you see there - but it sure does look like an exponential curve, doesn't it?
But I have a feeling you knew what I meant and are just being deliberately obtuse.
The Gaia hypothesis is science fiction compared to climate catastrophe, which is real.
I always see catastrophizing and autarkist-coded takes like this which imply the US is a house of cards because we don't manufacture everything under the sun at all times. You have to realize that preparing for a doomsday scenario like 50% fatality rate pandemic has a cost that someone foots the bill for. Even in 2020 with a buffoon running the country, we still reacted very quickly and developed multiple vaccines to combat a novel virus (yes, the response was bungled in other ways but I digress)... people, markets, etc. are adaptable and we will figure it out.