Doing basic math makes someone a "spreadsheet head"? If the "actual world" wanted American-made gloves then this cash injection from the government would've resulted in a boom in glove manufacturing here, no?
I always see catastrophizing and autarkist-coded takes like this which imply the US is a house of cards because we don't manufacture everything under the sun at all times. You have to realize that preparing for a doomsday scenario like 50% fatality rate pandemic has a cost that someone foots the bill for. Even in 2020 with a buffoon running the country, we still reacted very quickly and developed multiple vaccines to combat a novel virus (yes, the response was bungled in other ways but I digress)... people, markets, etc. are adaptable and we will figure it out.
Funny that you mention the military, as the US military is required by law to buy domestic to ensure some sort of domestic supply chains. Even for trivial things like t-shirts and gloves.
You don't need to optimise for the market. The market is the optimising machine. Get in its way with slow regulators or subsidies or bailouts and you get all the problems.
Why would this even be so. It's not magic it's just people doing stupid people things often to maximize short term factors. It only gets long-term planning insofar as embedded agents do. One of the things agents do is use incentives to inspire behaviour that is conta individuals short term incentives to achieve behaviour that contributes to long-term success.
Not only are many individual agents aligned with short term interests they often either can't because they will be pushed out by short term thinkers or literally benefit from net harm to all. America mostly being composed of the rich not the masses voting with their wallets.
This is the same market (or set of markets) that have lifted billions of people out of poverty. If you're arguing central planning does better then I'd love to see some evidence of it, but to my mind the fact that so many companies can coordinate, even across language barriers and legal systems, sometimes hundreds or thousands cooperating to make products, is incredible, and is not going to be beaten by any other system.
At least on average - of course an authoritarian country like the USSR can drag value out of its citizens by force and spend it on the space race, but that kills people and even, in that case, the country itself.
Far better to have cooperation and value exchange based on the demand generated by real people.
The problem is it's an optimizing function for the rich getting richer, not for the good of society, not for reducing human suffering, not even, y'know, the survival of the human race.
This is just silliness. Rich people got rich under capitalism by providing things people want for the best price. They're rich because they owns shares in valuable businesses that people want to buy the products of.
Some people get rich, on average by merit. And everyone gets the products they want at a low price. Can you imagine if the only cars available were made in the USSR, like Ladas? They were terrible because there was no capitalism, and so no competition. But if you'd rather have abysmal cars but know that no one got rich making them, I guess that's...a choice?
Like the Sacklers who got rich by... providing the best opiates. Or Zuck, who got rich by... destroying the fabric of our society. Or Big Oil, which got rich by... destroying ecosystems and dooming us all. Or United Fruit Company which got rich by... brutally colonizing Latin America.
It's almost as if the profit motive optimized for profit, not any other outcome that was in any way beneficial to anyone but the ones... profiting.
It takes a deep ideological commitment to close ones eyes to the reality in front of us.
Our planet is literally dying.
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
It actually can die but more accurately it can also become far less amenable to human thriving and kill off the majority of other species both of which appear to be happening
Obviously the planet won't die. The current biodiversity and the civilization depending on it however might.
In my country, streets are literally melting now, because they were never built for temperatures this high. We had 5000 heat deaths within 2 weeks. Temperatures never seen before in almost 250 years of consistent measurements of weather and temperature.
It's bad. And the data is available for everybody, including you, to see.
I always see catastrophizing and autarkist-coded takes like this which imply the US is a house of cards because we don't manufacture everything under the sun at all times. You have to realize that preparing for a doomsday scenario like 50% fatality rate pandemic has a cost that someone foots the bill for. Even in 2020 with a buffoon running the country, we still reacted very quickly and developed multiple vaccines to combat a novel virus (yes, the response was bungled in other ways but I digress)... people, markets, etc. are adaptable and we will figure it out.