> The west self-harm is contradicting itself by allowing both heavy labor-regulations in their own countries and trade with countries with basically no labor-regulations. It's just like they hate their own low skill workers so much that the politicians intentionally destroyed the factory job market.

This is the problem but you have the motive wrong. It wasn't intentionally destroyed, it was a complete lack of concern about whether or not it was destroyed.

You have, on the one hand, unions and others who lobby for more regulations. They have perverse incentives. If they get a new regulation that increases US manufacturing costs by 2%, they get credit for protecting workers. But they don't get credit for regulations passed in the 1970s, so they're always asking for more, so the cost of US manufacturing is always going up.

Manufacturing companies would have the incentive to counterbalance this by lobbying against them, if they didn't have the alternative to offshore manufacturing to countries without this. But they do, so they do that instead.

So regulations that can't pass a cost benefit analysis, or that no longer make sense because things have changed or we know more now than we did then, are still on the books and have no obvious path to being removed.

Politicians have no incentive to fix this because their incentives are to make the lobbyists happy. The unions are happy that they get to take credit for passing more regulations all the time and the corporations are happy that they get to avoid all the regulations by manufacturing in other countries, so who is the lobby to fix it?