The panic in the United States over the lack of masks and ventilators for Covid-19 has mostly eased, but please, don’t let those scary few weeks fade too quickly. The scramble for medical equipment was a telling moment for the American economy because it revealed something alarming: The United States can no longer produce what it needs in a time of crisis, even if those things were invented here.
In the past two decades, the U.S. economy has been lulled into following a path of offshoring, driven by an ideology celebrating short-term financial gains above everything else.
