PhillyDeals: A bold call to bring American manufacturing back

Andrew Liveris, boss at Dow Chemical Co., is an immigrant engineer with a broad agenda: He wants the U.S. government to make American manufacturing strong again.

Bring back factories? Aren't we a knowledge-based, financially driven, high-level service economy now?

"Denial," Liveris calls that view in his new book, Make It in America, which his handlers pressed on me during a recent Liveris visit to Dow's Advanced Materials division headquarters in Philadelphia.

Liveris slams the "apostles" of postindustrial America - ex-Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, glib writers such as Tom Friedman at the New York Times and Gregg Easterbrook at the New Republic, policy lobbyists at the libertarian Cato Institute and the liberal Center for American Progress - and anyone else who ever called factory shutdowns and offshore outsourcing natural steps on the road to an idea-based capitalist paradise.

"What they are selling is just plain wrong," Liveris writes. "Where manufacturing goes, the ideas follow. . . . If we do nothing, we will be left with nothing."

What's he want? Corporate welfare for the manufacturing sector? "It's a false choice to say that you can either be pro-business or pro-government. They must work in concert."

In Liveris' vision, factories add more jobs than banks, or home builders, or fast-food chains; they breed suppliers, vendors, more factories. They've been leaving America, not so much for cheaper labor, but for Germany, China, and other countries that have learned the value of manufacturing, standardized math, science, and writing education, and offered progressively lower taxes and bigger subsidies to attract companies that make useful things.

Kindles and solar panels were developed here; they should be made here, not just in East Asia, he says. To get them back, "we actually need more government, not less."

Dow still employs more than half its workers in the United States, though most of its sales are overseas. Liveris, an Australian native, says he wants to keep it that way. But he says he won't be able to if manufacturing, now just 12 percent of the U.S. economy, keeps getting paid to move away.

"America has, for decades, neglected the things that matter most to its economic health," destroying millions of jobs and the middle-income lifestyle, he says.

For a lot of people whose families used to live in Philadelphia rowhouse neighborhoods ruined when the factories moved out, that sounds like common sense.