The American economy should be judged by whether it makes the nation stronger: whether Americans can build productive lives, whether the country can make what it needs, whether strategic industries remain at home, and whether prosperity strengthens national independence rather than undermining it.
America First rejects the idea that the highest goal of economic policy is simply the cheapest possible consumer good or the largest possible headline GDP. Markets are powerful tools, but they exist inside a nation. Economic policy should produce rising wages, productive investment, technological leadership, resilient supply chains, strong communities, and the industrial capacity necessary for national security.
An economy is not successful simply because financial markets rise, multinational corporations increase profits, or consumers can buy inexpensive imported goods. Those outcomes matter, but they are incomplete measures of national prosperity.
The more important questions are whether ordinary Americans can find productive work, afford homes and families, develop valuable skills, move upward economically, and live in communities with durable sources of employment and investment.
America First therefore evaluates economic policy from the standpoint of the American citizen rather than the abstract global consumer. A policy that lowers the price of a product by a few dollars but destroys strategic production, weakens wages, hollows out communities, and leaves the country dependent on a rival may be economically cheap but nationally expensive.
Manufacturing is not a relic of an earlier economy. Advanced manufacturing concentrates engineering, technical knowledge, supply-chain expertise, research, skilled labor, capital investment, and the ability to turn inventions into physical products at scale.
When production leaves a country, capabilities can leave with it. Tooling, supplier networks, industrial skills, process knowledge, and engineering experience often cluster around actual factories. Once an ecosystem disappears, rebuilding it can take years even when money is available.
Marc Fasteau and Ian Fletcher argue in Industrial Policy for the United States that America has allowed too many high-value industries and good jobs to migrate abroad while assuming that innovation and services could indefinitely compensate for the loss of manufacturing. Their broader point is central to America First economics: a modern nation cannot remain economically and strategically dominant if it continually gives up sophisticated industries to competitors.
America First supports tariffs because trade policy should shape the location of production rather than treat that location as economically irrelevant. When foreign producers benefit from lower labor costs, industrial subsidies, state financing, manipulated markets, or strategic government support, unrestricted imports can destroy domestic industries that would otherwise be valuable to the United States.
Tariffs raise the cost of serving the American market from abroad and thereby create an incentive to produce inside the United States. They can protect emerging industries, preserve industries under strategic pressure, counter foreign subsidies, and give domestic firms the market scale necessary to invest.
This does not mean every tariff has identical benefits or that tariffs have no costs. Imported inputs can become more expensive, retaliation can occur, and poorly designed protection can shelter inefficient firms indefinitely. The answer is not to abandon tariffs but to use them as part of a coherent industrial strategy with clear national objectives.
Private markets are excellent at discovering opportunities and allocating capital, but the incentives facing an individual firm are not identical to the strategic needs of a nation. A company may rationally move production abroad because doing so raises its profit margin even when the cumulative result makes the United States weaker.
Industrial policy recognizes this difference. Government does not need to micromanage every factory or replace private enterprise. It does need to create conditions in which strategically valuable industries can survive, scale, innovate, and compete from American soil.
The framework advanced by Fasteau and Fletcher is broader than tariffs or subsidies alone. It combines trade policy with support for manufacturing, research and commercialization, workforce skills, strategic finance, infrastructure, procurement, technology policy, and attention to the trade balance.
Ensure that inventions developed in America are also scaled into industries and manufacturing systems located in America.
Use federal purchasing power to create stable domestic demand for American-made strategic products.
Industrial power requires ports, rail, roads, energy, water, broadband, and a reliable electrical grid capable of supporting large-scale production.
Rebuild technical education, apprenticeships, engineering pipelines, and skilled trades alongside the industries that employ them.
Use financing tools where necessary to help high-value domestic projects overcome unusually large startup costs or foreign state competition.
Trade, tax, energy, technology, defense, education, and infrastructure policy should reinforce one another rather than operate at cross-purposes.
For decades, many American corporations lowered costs by shifting manufacturing to countries with cheaper labor, large government subsidies, weaker regulatory environments, or established industrial ecosystems. Shareholders often benefited. Consumers sometimes received lower prices. But communities that lost factories experienced a different side of the transaction.
Factories support more than the workers inside them. They sustain suppliers, machine shops, transport networks, restaurants, local tax bases, technical schools, construction, and generations of accumulated industrial knowledge. When production disappears, the economic damage can compound across an entire region.
The doctrine therefore rejects the assumption that a company’s decision to offshore is automatically in the national interest simply because it is profitable. Corporations operate under American law, use American infrastructure, sell into the American market, depend on American financial institutions, and often benefit directly from public spending and legal protections.
Employers naturally prefer abundant labor because it makes hiring easier and can reduce wage pressure. Workers often benefit from the opposite condition: when labor is scarce, businesses compete harder for employees, raise wages, improve conditions, train people they previously ignored, and invest in technology that makes each worker more productive.
America First therefore does not treat every labor shortage as a problem government must solve by expanding immigration or importing more temporary workers. In many cases, scarcity is the mechanism through which labor gains bargaining power.
Industrial policy and worker policy reinforce each other. High-value manufacturing can support better wages because advanced production tends to rely on capital, skills, engineering, and productivity rather than permanently competing on the lowest possible labor cost.
The pandemic demonstrated how quickly efficient global supply chains can become national vulnerabilities. Shortages of medical equipment, medicines, semiconductors, and industrial inputs showed that low inventories and geographically concentrated production can fail under crisis conditions.
Not every consumer product needs to be made entirely in the United States. But strategic sectors require a higher standard. America should possess domestic capacity—or highly reliable allied redundancy—in products whose disruption could cripple defense, healthcare, transportation, energy, communications, food production, or advanced industry.
China is not simply another low-cost trading partner. It is a major industrial power and geopolitical competitor whose government has deliberately used subsidies, state financing, procurement rules, technology policy, export controls, and long-term industrial planning to build leadership in strategic sectors.
The United States should not respond by attempting to eliminate every commercial relationship with China. It should distinguish ordinary trade from strategic dependency. Critical technologies, defense inputs, communications infrastructure, medicines, advanced manufacturing equipment, semiconductors, and other essential sectors should not be vulnerable to coercion by a competitor.
Trade policy toward China should therefore combine tariffs, investment screening, export controls, supply-chain relocation, domestic production incentives, and enforcement against intellectual-property theft or unfair state-backed competition.
Manufacturing depends on reliable and competitively priced energy. Electricity-intensive industries, chemicals, metals, data centers, transport, defense production, and modern infrastructure cannot flourish on an unstable or needlessly expensive energy system.
America First therefore supports a broad domestic energy strategy built around reliability, abundance, and strategic independence. Oil and natural gas remain important, while nuclear power offers dense, reliable generation that can support industrial expansion. Grid modernization and new generation capacity should be treated as industrial policy.
National economic strength cannot be measured only through a handful of globally dominant corporations. Small manufacturers, contractors, machine shops, family businesses, farms, skilled trades, regional banks, and locally rooted firms are part of the productive fabric of the country.
Large industrial investments can generate entire ecosystems of smaller suppliers and service firms. Reindustrialization therefore has a geographic dimension: it can restore tax bases, apprenticeships, housing demand, local institutions, and the economic confidence that allows families and communities to plan for the future.
Every major economic policy should be tested against a broader definition of prosperity than short-term efficiency alone.
An industrial economy ultimately exists through the people who build, operate, maintain, design, transport, and improve it. The next section examines wages, worker bargaining power, skills, immigration and labor supply, family-supporting employment, unions, automation, and what it means to place the American worker at the center of economic policy.
Continue to Labor & the American Worker →