As with most of our successful industries, they don't get any grease since they always seem to be working properly and cheerfully printing out money. Meanwhile we're busy chasing all the other squealing gears in our economy instead of focusing on what currently works, and we don't feel like it needs our attention. So we let our attention drift (or be directed) elsewhere, while thieves, saboteurs and vulture capitalists around the world quietly dismantle it and part it out, leaving an empty shell that looks like it's still working but it's all an illusion projected from afar and there's nothing left inside. It's all gone. Then it collapses, and we assume it must've been a scam all along, and tell ourselves we were just deluding ourselves that we could ever actually compete on the world stage, and we tell ourselves that being the world's 10th largest economy, depending how you count, is just because we sell off all our resources and we've really got nothing else to offer the world.

And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as we are then unable to provide high-skilled jobs for our well-educated workforce, and they leave to seek jobs in the places that gutted our industries in the first place, pretending it's just the "free market". Free to knife and murder the competition, yes, that kind of free.