The ecosystem to build cheap physical products is incredibly important for creating new wealth. If you're building something new, in manufacturing cities in China you can walk across the street and get everything you need. In the U.S. you have to fly to China and build relationships with Chinese suppliers. Which means creation of new products, which is where most future wealth will come from, is extremely difficult. This is like Germany lacking a meaningful tech ecosystem because creating tech startups is so difficult.

We can make planes and engines because we kept the expertise, and we can make rockets because of herculean efforts of a few people. This simply isn't good enough, we need to make creating new physical things as easy as possible.