Economically speaking, is America better off by having its manufacturing plants in China?

The economic discussion is just a narrow part of the issue. The question of know-how and production infrastructures has been vastly ignored in political debates in Europe and the USA during the last decades, but is instrumental.

You can earn more money by outsourcing, but if you lose the ability to produce key components of your economy and buy them from your competitors, what will you do when they stop to supply it?

This text was originally published in quora.