About 40 years ago, when I took my first economics course, in Resources, my professor made an outrageous statement: The American economy was going to be based more and more upon providing services and less and less upon manufacturing. We students thought he was insane. I guess not. More and more of our stuff is being outsourced to the rest of the world while we trade rocks back and forth and live on the profits.

One of the major sources of the American Revolution was England's insistence upon doing all the manufacturing and only letting us produce raw materials. Now we are doing it to ourselves.