A part of President-elect Donald Trump's plan to "Make America Great Again" includes focussing on making domestic manufacturing competitive. Increasing competitiveness results from several things:
1. Restraining costs
2. Sustaining best product quality
3. Ensuring and enforcing fair trade rules
The government is about the business of creating an optimal environment in which individuals and their corporations can thrive. The government is about optimizing return on national resources. It is also about developing national resources including people and natural resources.
The modern paradigm governing public and private performance is called "triple bottom-line." That is, aggregate performance is measured in three dimensions:
1. Economic responsibility
2. Social responsibility
3. Environmental responsibility
In America, economic performance is a product of public and private partnerships. All government and business enterprises are corporations that are governed by laws and regulations. A President of the United States is the executive leader of the federal government enterprise and can modify, retire, and replace and eliminate laws and regulations subject to Congressional approval.
Otherwise, a President leads the effort to manage the business rules that govern all enterprises. Business rules that are embodied in laws and regulations carry a cost. They may also provide incentives for what is determined to be strategically positive performance. They include constraints and punishment for deficient performance.
In America, there is regulated capitalism. Unrestrained capitalism would have the business and industrial corporations maximizing profits and maximizing markets at the expense of clean air and water, for instance. They may produce products that compromise safety. History shows that is true. Therefore, laws and regulations are necessary to mitigate errant performance that may not be regulated by consumers alone.
Other instances of the necessity for government intervention in capitalism include worker health and safety. It includes protection for workers and their right to organize and express their contracts collectively.
The structure of business rules extend into the global environment and include consideration for finance and banking as well as the environment and competitive working conditions.
The modern paradigm is to pursue sustainable economies from the bottom up. That is, the challenge for local community viability is to achieve the justification for their existence by demonstrating value-adding worth in the greater context. Local performance is based upon local economic systems and networks among public and private enterprises.
Manufacturing products that are superior in market performance begins with unique and exceptional design, engineering, and production as well as logistics and distribution, marketing and sales.
Manufacturing products includes a pyramid of goods and services, leading to the final assembly of parts into finished products.
In my lifecycle of work experiences, I have been engaged in nearly every type of enterprise including all types of manufacturing. I have learned the strategic importance of having robust domestic manufacturing capabilities for several reasons:
1. The manufacturing industry is a primary source for progressive capability development and upward mobile opportunity for individuals including entrepreneurs and workers.
2. Manufacturing is strategically essential to national security because it ensures domestic skill, knowledge, experience, proficiency and capacity to produce a hierarchy of advancing technologies.
3. American industrial policy has permitted the dangerous erosion of manufacturing capabilities that includes the loss of knowledge and skills essential to competitive performance throughout all levels of the manufacturing and production processes.
Renewing Manufacturing America is, therefore, a strategic imperative.
