>What the heck? When did this sort of economically irresponsible thinking become so mainstream?
It's not "irresponsible" to deny the existence of some utopia where everyone's interests align. It's not worth competing with virtual slave labor. A perpetual race to the bottom is not what we should be striving for. With our current standard of living, or even half of it, we don't make anything that is going to be economical to export in the long run.
>The benefits of protectionism are what are short-term, but they leave both us and China materially poorer in the long term.
You're not entirely wrong. There is a cost to duplicating effort. What is the cost of not being independent? Your country's sovereignty and maybe your life. Let us take care of ourselves as best we can and import only a small amount of stuff.
>Life today is better than it was in the 1950s — and a large part of that is knowing our comparative advantage and leaning into it, not trying to restore long-dead industries by political fiat and throwing trillions in good resources after bad initiatives.
I think many would argue that life is worse today than it was in the 50s. Sure we have more consumer goods, but housing is unaffordable and many people are working well beneath their capacity at meaningless make-work jobs in the service industry. The "long-dead industries" you speak of are alive and well, just not HERE. Not because others are necessarily doing those things better either. It is all about labor costs and regulations in conjunction with international competition.
>If we want to help workers who are struggling - then tax more and redistribute more.
First of all, many aren't working at all because there are no good jobs for them. Second of all, what exactly are we going to tax if everything is offshored consistent with the current trend? What are we going to buy our imports with, the land under our feet (which is finite and also our home)? Increasingly worthless paper, promises to drop bombs or not drop bombs somewhere, etc.?
>If we want to help workers who are struggling - then tax more and redistribute more. Don’t throw a wrench into mutually beneficial trade (and completely sabotage our critical climate goals while we are at it, it makes no sense that we treat BYD the way we do).
Oh yes, nothing more critical to cutting pollution than shipping giant logs to China to be turned into toothpicks. Give me a break. It makes total sense that we treat BYD the way we do. It is unfair competition that would destroy one of the few industries we have left, and China isn't exactly eager to buy cars from us (nevermind that they cost too much for the Chinese anyway). We might all be better off if every country produced what it could. It may lead to new discoveries in design and production methods. And if international trade was not an issue, countries could freely copy each other's IP for domestic use. That last part might be too optimistic but monopolies create stagnation.
> You're not entirely wrong. There is a cost to duplicating effort. What is the cost of not being independent? Your country's sovereignty and maybe your life. Let us take care of ourselves as best we can and import only a small amount of stuff.
At what scale does that become true?
Certainly an individual is not better off importing as little as possible? This would mean not working any traditional job, not buying tools, not buying food, but crafting a comfortable life on one's own starting naked and with bare hands. Certainly it doesn't make sense to apply such a policy to the individual.
Should cities then be the scale at which this cutover happens? If a natural resource does not appear in its geography the citizenry must do without? Every city farms all of its own food, has factories for all told and merchandise its citizens wish for? Cars, industrial equipment, forestry, mining, clothing, food, technology, all made within the city limits? There is not even enough room for all of this.
A US state? A small country? What is the cutover point at which one is not impoverished by such a policy?
Or perhaps you believe I take too extreme a position on protectionism and think some trade is good at any scale. The same threshold must exist:
If it improves our well being to trade a little, what is the threshold at which more trade stops making us better off? Where is the inflection point at which a bit more trade hurts us? Can you point us to a country with an optional amount of trade? Or could you compare two countries based on their amount of trade and tell us which is better?
If you prefer a different framing: hopefully we can agree that isolationism at the level of North Korea is a negative for its citizenry, independent of the dictatorial regime they live under. It seems that you believe the US trades too much. So we can imagine a curve of some sort on a graph with the US on the left end and North Korea on the right. The slope moving from US starts off positive. The slope moving from North Korea starts negative. Somewhere between the two, there must be a maximum. How would one calculate it?
It's not "irresponsible" to deny the existence of some utopia where everyone's interests align. It's not worth competing with virtual slave labor. A perpetual race to the bottom is not what we should be striving for. With our current standard of living, or even half of it, we don't make anything that is going to be economical to export in the long run.
>The benefits of protectionism are what are short-term, but they leave both us and China materially poorer in the long term.
You're not entirely wrong. There is a cost to duplicating effort. What is the cost of not being independent? Your country's sovereignty and maybe your life. Let us take care of ourselves as best we can and import only a small amount of stuff.
>Life today is better than it was in the 1950s — and a large part of that is knowing our comparative advantage and leaning into it, not trying to restore long-dead industries by political fiat and throwing trillions in good resources after bad initiatives.
I think many would argue that life is worse today than it was in the 50s. Sure we have more consumer goods, but housing is unaffordable and many people are working well beneath their capacity at meaningless make-work jobs in the service industry. The "long-dead industries" you speak of are alive and well, just not HERE. Not because others are necessarily doing those things better either. It is all about labor costs and regulations in conjunction with international competition.
>If we want to help workers who are struggling - then tax more and redistribute more.
First of all, many aren't working at all because there are no good jobs for them. Second of all, what exactly are we going to tax if everything is offshored consistent with the current trend? What are we going to buy our imports with, the land under our feet (which is finite and also our home)? Increasingly worthless paper, promises to drop bombs or not drop bombs somewhere, etc.?
>If we want to help workers who are struggling - then tax more and redistribute more. Don’t throw a wrench into mutually beneficial trade (and completely sabotage our critical climate goals while we are at it, it makes no sense that we treat BYD the way we do).
Oh yes, nothing more critical to cutting pollution than shipping giant logs to China to be turned into toothpicks. Give me a break. It makes total sense that we treat BYD the way we do. It is unfair competition that would destroy one of the few industries we have left, and China isn't exactly eager to buy cars from us (nevermind that they cost too much for the Chinese anyway). We might all be better off if every country produced what it could. It may lead to new discoveries in design and production methods. And if international trade was not an issue, countries could freely copy each other's IP for domestic use. That last part might be too optimistic but monopolies create stagnation.