What President Trump Can Do With The American System 2.0 - Flipbook - Page 16
goods to the farmers and the cheap transportation of their products to various markets (infrastructure). Together with improvements in
land management and fertilizers, the average
farmer’s productive power of labor increased by
leaps and bounds.
After a century as a nation, the percentage
of the labor force that needed to be engaged in
agriculture just to feed the population dropped
from 95 percent to 50 percent. After World War
II, it was down to 10 percent, and today it’s at
2 percent. Stated another way, in 1910, each
farmworker produced enough food to support
9 people. By 1978, each individual farmworker
could sustain 65 people with the fruits of their
labor. This is an excellent example of negentropic growth: increasing productive powers of labor
enabled a steady decline in the percentage of the labor
force required to produce the agricultural components
of the energy of the system.
Negentropic growth isn’t created by employing large numbers of people cheaply; it’s created
by increasing the productive powers of labor of
an educated and skilled workforce. Let’s look at
how we utilize these principles to accelerate our
return to being a manufacturing superpower.
Natural Resources, Raw Materials,
and Energy Flux-Density
According to a 2024 Mineral Commodity Summaries Report by the United States Geological
Survey, the United States is now reliant on imports for more than one-half of the country’s
consumption of 49 minerals, and 100 percent
import-dependent for 15 of them. China continues to be the top supplier of the minerals
that the U.S. needs, and it dominates the global
production and export of minerals, such as rare
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earth elements, graphite, and lithium, which are
vital for the energy, manufacturing, technology,
transportation, infrastructure, and defense.
We obviously can’t cover every raw material
here, so let’s focus on one of the most important
raw materials for a modern economy: iron ore
for steel production.1 Vital components of the
U.S. economy—from heavy machinery manufacturing, shipbuilding, heavy construction,
power plant construction, railway construction,
etc.—are dependent on steel production, and expanding our economy will require a massive increase. To build 200 one-gigawa琀琀 nuclear power
plants will require 6 to 7 million metric tons of
steel. To build a modern freight and passenger
rail system requires 175 tons of steel per mile.
And the continental water project, the North
American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), would require an estimated 300 million
tons of steel to construct. The question of steel
production is a ma琀琀er of both national security
and the overall ability of the United States to
successfully progress into the future.
Before the failed policies of the past two generations, the U.S. was a world leader in steel production. How did we get there? Our history of
iron and steel production provides an excellent
demonstration of physical economic principles
required for reviving the production of steel
and other raw materials at the highest levels of
productivity and e昀케ciency ever seen.
In 1830, the average U.S. iron and steel worker
produced 10 tons per year. By 1900, productivity
leaped to 70 tons per worker per year. By 1970,
it reached 180 tons per worker per year. These
1. Steel production and consumption has been recognized as a general proxy for economic growth. As the primary element in steel, iron is, by far, the most produced
element of the periodic table by weight.
What President Trump Can Do With the American System 2.0
