The PROBLEM with Capitalism - Smarter Every Day 316

Can you manufacture something completely in America? That is still the question. In the first video on this topic, I explained how we tried to make a simple barbecue grill scrubber completely in America, and depending on who you ask, we either succeeded or we failed miserably.

This started off as an engineering challenge for me, because my parents were auto workers, and I wanted to make something in America because that was important to me.

But what I learned was way bigger than that. I learned about systemic challenges in our capitalistic system if you have no ethics applied.

I learned about things like monopsony, which is a fancy word that we'll go into later. There are systemic level issues in the whole manufacturing thing in America that are important to understand, because if you don't understand them, you will trade short-term gains for long-term freedom and self-reliance.

This little project has taught me so much because I thought I was just going to try to flip on some manufacturing capacity here in Alabama, but it's so much bigger than that.

It's like kicking a hornet's nest, because now I understand the whole system has a problem, and other people are recognizing that as well.

Today, on Smarter Every Day, we're going to dive into these issues and try to understand more about the importance of self-reliance and manufacturing in your local area.

Let's go get smarter every day.

This is my buddy John Youngblood. This product idea was his. My contribution was just wanting to manufacture a thing in America.

And when we released this video together after we partnered up, we were overwhelmed with the response.

People just wanting to talk about how interesting the project was. Other people who had experienced manufacturing woes and wanted to illustrate their issues.

It was a fascinating thing. We even got to kind of look at ourselves from the outside looking in, because PBS NewsHour, that's Paul Solman.