Opinion | Marco Rubio: The Coronavirus Shows We Need a More Resilient American Economy – The New York Times

Americans are a resilient people. We persevere through difficult circumstances and arrive triumphant on the other side of adversity. It’s in our national DNA.

Once again, Americans are rising to the challenge before us. Medical professionals are meeting the call of duty and tending to our sick at great personal risk. Grocery stores, takeout restaurants and pharmacies remain open as Americans show up for work to give the rest of us access to essential goods. Families are working to overcome the tremendous economic damage they face as a result of the coronavirus.

Though I believe resilience is one of the defining traits of an American, I also believe it’s been absent from our public policy for too long. And this has become devastatingly clear in the current crisis.

Over the past several decades, our nation’s political and economic leaders, Democratic and Republican, made choices about how to structure our society — choosing to prize economic efficiency over resiliency, financial gains over Main Street investment, individual enrichment over the common good.

Any prudent policymaker should recognize that both efficiency and resiliency are values we should prioritize and seek to balance. But that’s not what we have done in recent decades. Those choices, from offshoring to building an economy based on finance and service, have produced one of the most efficient economic engines of all time. But a pendulum can swing too far in one direction. And when an economy lacks resiliency, it can be devastating in a crisis.

On the 2016 campaign trail, I spoke repeatedly with hard-working Americans who felt helpless as they watched jobs disappear and their communities crumble because businesses and lawmakers prioritized maximizing short-term gains over the long-term security of America, its communities and its people.

My time serving on the Select Committee on Intelligence was similarly transformative; in instance after instance, it was clear that many of the serious problems we face originated in our economic relationship with China. As did many, I believed capitalism would change China for the better; instead, China changed capitalism for the worse. This new status quo means younger generations, including my children, will grow up in an America of reduced economic prospects.

Today, the result of these failed policy choices is that our manufacturing base is severely diminished, and millions of productive jobs that relied on it are gone. The American domestic supply chain devoted to producing vital medical supplies like generic pharmaceuticals and respirators has withered. For decades America made the conscious choice to facilitate offshoring to China, where labor was cheap, and, critically, the Chinese Communist Party assisted businesses in long-term productive capital development that might seem irrational in the short term. Decisions such as to allow Beijing into the World Trade Organization threw fuel on the fire.

And look at what happened the moment the world faced a pandemic — an inevitability, considering the historical record.