The Trades: Self-Reliance Through Practical Skills

While universities graduate students with degrees in subjects no one will pay for, plumbers earn $80,000 a year and can't be outsourced.

This reality should inform how we think about self-reliance.

The Trade Skill Advantage

Trade skills offer something increasingly rare in the modern economy: genuine security through capability.

‍You can't offshore a clogged drain. When someone's toilet breaks at midnight, they need a local plumber. No amount of technology changes this. No AI replaces the person who shows up with tools and knows how to use them.

‍You can't automate electrical work. Every building needs electrical systems. Every electrical system needs maintenance. Every maintenance task needs a licensed, capable human.

‍You can't digitize a roof repair. Houses don't exist in the cloud. They exist in physical space, exposed to physical weather, requiring physical repairs by physical people.

Trade skills are self-reliance made tangible. They represent capability that can't be taken away, outsourced, or made obsolete.

The Credentialism Trap

Modern society has convinced young people that the only path to success runs through a four-year university. This belief has:

Saddled millions with student debt

• Created credential inflation (jobs that don't require degrees now demand them)
• Starved the trades of new workers
• Produced graduates with no marketable skills

Meanwhile, trade school graduates often enter the workforce with zero debt, immediate employment, and clear career paths. By the time their peers finish graduate school, tradespeople own homes and have built wealth.

The Self-Reliance of Making Things Work

There's a deeper dimension to trade skills: the mindset they develop.

A tradesperson encounters problems that must be solved, not discussed. The broken pipe doesn't care about theories of pipe repair. It needs someone who can actually fix it.

This develops what might be called "practical self-reliance"—the habit of confronting reality directly and solving problems that have objective solutions. You can't fake competence when the toilet is still flooding.

Compare this to many white-collar jobs, where success is often measured by perceptions, politics, and presentations. It's possible to advance without actually producing anything. It's possible to "succeed" without developing real capability.

Trades don't allow this. They select for people who can actually do things.

The Coming Trade Shortage

America faces a dramatic shortage of skilled tradespeople. The average plumber is over 55. The average electrician is over 50. An entire generation of tradespeople is approaching retirement, and not enough young people are entering these fields.

This creates extraordinary opportunity for those willing to learn.

A young person who enters the trades today can expect:

Immediate employment

• Strong wages
• Minimal debt
• Steady demand for their skills
• The option to start their own business
• Work that AI cannot replace

Compare this to the typical college graduate: significant debt, uncertain employment, and jobs that may not exist in ten years.

GSU's Approach

Global Sovereign University includes trade mathematics and practical skills in our curriculum specifically because we understand their connection to self-reliance.

We don't believe everyone should become a plumber. But we do believe everyone should understand how things work, how to solve practical problems, and that trade skills represent legitimate and valuable paths to self-reliance.

Our Trade Math curriculum teaches the mathematical skills tradespeople actually use: measurement, estimation, pricing, and practical geometry. Students discover that math isn't abstract theory—it's how you build and repair the physical world.

The Bottom Line

Self-reliance ultimately means having skills people will pay for. Trade skills offer some of the most reliable, unfakeable, and unoutsourcable forms of capability available.

A society that respects the trades is a society that respects practical self-reliance. A society that pushes everyone toward credentials while sneering at people who work with their hands has lost touch with what actually keeps civilization running.

‍Read the book: The Talent of Self-Reliance: The Case for the Republic over the Misery of the Collective