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Pouring gasoline all over my body and lighting a match because the experts told me not to (and how dare they tell me what to do?) is a completely different type of thing than nuanced risk taking and experimentation.
We can do things differently, improve on our flaws and take healthy risks. We can challenge the orthodox opinions of professionals. We don't need to light ourselves on fire to do this.
Alternate comparison! Nearly every country on the face of the earth has tariffs against US goods. It's working out fantastic for them. I regularly read articles about how protectionism is the secret sauce behind China's economy.
Maybe we were the ones pouring gasoline all over our body and lighting the match because the experts told us we have to.
Written by whom, Experts?
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China and the other successful Asian economics used protectionism to target specific industries for development (often picked through pure cronyism of course, see Japan and Korea.)
The two secret ingredients are a) going for stuff you can get cheap capital and inputs for, and b) imposing the costs on workers who are already poor and won't really notice how much the policy is hurting them.
China started by importing old labor-intensive machine tooling from Europe, and heavily subsidized their light manufacturing exports. The workers were coming straight off of disastrous collective farms and didn't notice or care that much of their output was going towards American consumer surplus and the dead weight loss of the subsidy. They kept this ball rolling one industry at a time all the way to where they are now, at the cost of still being heavily export-dependent with depressed domestic consumption.
(One reason tariffs against China are good policy rn imo: they have overinvested in a ton of export manufacturing, and have little choice but to eat most of the loss themselves or let too many well-connected investors and pension funds lose their shirts/heads. Their whole EV battery industry is hemorrhaging money and so desperate for overseas sales that battery prices kept dropping after the tariffs.)
That doesn't really work in the US when workers would face huge reductions to their current quality of life to make American manufacturing competitive.
Especially trying to do it for everything, all at once.
We could get rid of migrant farm labor by subsidizing/tariff-exempting cheap automated farming equipment from China. Or we could expand immigration to get cheap manufacturing labor, bringing all those Mexican border factories to the US side and taxing competing imports. But doing both at once is impossible.
Could we? We're not reaping grain by hand these days. My understanding is that farm labor mostly goes towards harvesting fruits and vegetables and that this largely has not been automated anywhere because it's really hard. I'd be surprised if it's been economically automated in China where labor cost is much lower. I'm sure they have prototype robots, but do they have any in actual use?
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Really? Aren't prices falling because of technological development, ruthless competition and economies of scale? They use subsidies to build up industries but Chinese industry is so big it can't possibly be reliant on subsidies in the medium or long-term. You can't just subsidise the whole economy and pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
https://x.com/alojoh/status/1778746545481126308
BYD seemingly got a mere 2.4 billion over 8 years, that's peanuts. It's profitable despite the subsidy.
https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3228224/overcapacity-chinas-ev-battery-industry-reach-four-times-demand-2025-putting-small-players-risk
This is why you can get lithium batteries on Amazon for half the price they were last year, even after biden's new tariffs. Especially now Tesla isn't buying Chinese LFPs any more. They're doing anything they can to sell cells.
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That's both not true in a meaningful sense, most of our meaningful trade partners have only limited tariffs on a small number of industries or businesses which is not anywhere near equal to large tariffs on everything and not true because the US economy is substantially stronger and better than most other countries in the world.
Lots of countries have tried autarky before, somehow despite it being incredibly effective apparently, none of them ended up doing well. If we're pouring gas on ourselves, it's strange how rich and powerful America has become doing so.
Also important, free trade is historically the revolutionary idea. Free trade economists like Smith and Ricardo were the ones who pushed back on the mercentalist mindset that dominated the elite class of the time, and the countries that adopted trade grew up strong.
So howcome I have never seen a "made in USA" label, and why is the local agribusiness periodically shiitting bricks at the prospect of dropping tariffs on food?
Because service exports don't have stickers on them. Or are you not using netflix, amazon, windows etc? And also you can just check what tariffs currently are, according to WTO the EU has an average tariff of 5%. (11.3% for agriculture, lower for rest)
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You haven’t?
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Iirc you don't live in the US, right?
Off the top of my head, I recently bought an American made water filter. Klein tools are also American made.
Yeah, and I think this is a necessary condition for the argument to even be relevant.
If he's saying "allied countries put tariffs on only a handful of industries", but I haven't seen any American products, that would imply the industries that are targeted are precisely the ones that are competitive, making the "handful" argument moot.
Do you ever see “Product of USA” at the grocery store? Food is a decently-sized export.
The main exports are refined petroleum products and capital goods. You don’t see these at the general store with “Made In USA” labels on them, but your country’s infrastructure runs on American products.
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Seriously just go Walmart and look. It's not a majority of items, but there are plenty of things with the label.
You also have to remember that a true "made in usa" label is very strict. An appliance that's otherwise made in usa except with imported knobs or buttons is not even able to be sold as made in usa.
I'm European, never seen a Wallmart in my life, and this argument makes no sense since we are discussing tariffs.
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Things with "Made in USA" labels tend to place it pretty prominently, often with a flag or red/white/blue. And they tend to be at least a bit more expensive than the alternatives: there seems to be a bit of an assumption of some economic nationalism going on where those products are seen as "premium".
Of course, economic nationalism is sometimes blamed for causing trade imbalances: "The Japanese market isn't interested in American electronics" is something I remember hearing back when the Japan Takes Over The World trope was running strong. Similar things are sometimes said about China today, too. And I'm not sure how "buy domestic" preference generally squares with the administration's concern about trade imbalance: are they willing to discourage it here, or is the standard being applied potentially unfairly?
Sometimes you can even buy essentially the same thing but made in the US, with a big 'made in the US label' and it costs more, as with New Balance trainers. There's a 'Made in the UK' version as well. Both the US/UK versions are actually better quality than the made in Vietnam ones, I would say – but also twice the cost (in the UK, £199 vs £99).
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American manufacturing is actually really strong https://www.cato.org/blog/united-states-remains-manufacturing-powerhouse
There's not as many jobs in manufacturing because automation. There's absolutely no reason to cuck ourselves employing people to do things that machines have been able to do for decades, and it's freed up labor into other goods and services. And again this has made the US into the economic marvel that it is too.
Free trade actually benefits a lot of agriculture too. Even the Trump admin knows this given they subsidized farmers during the first trade war and are planning more now https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/us/politics/farmers-bailouts-trump-tariffs.html
I suppose it's possible we're using a lot of American components and capital goods (if you buy as local flight in Europe, it will almost certainly be on a Boeing, from my experince), but most consumer goods seem to be Chinese.
What I'm saying is that Europe has strong tariffs against American agricultural, and our farmers regularly freak out at the prospect of lowering them.
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A relevant point to the "why do I never see 'made in USA' labels" is that US manufacturing strengths are not low-end consumer goods like textiles or plasticrap. The US does a lot of high-value manufacturing, but those products are often sold to other businesses.
Yeah exactly. The US economy by freeing our labor up from much of the basic work other countries can do cheaper has allowed for so much room into high value manufacturing and services.
I often see a complaint about "bullshit jobs" where people don't feel like they're productive, and there certainly is some that exist because of regulations that aren't necessary (like the people who need to make five hundred pages of environmental reviews instead of just a concise 2-5 page paper) or because their employers are not perfectly optimized machines who never make mistakes but in general American wages are so absurdly high on average because our jobs are actually doing a lot of productive work in ways we might not be able to directly appreciate.
The average American office worker gets paid a shit ton of money to file paperwork or do accounting or whatever because the company believes it is worth the expense whether that be direct gains like manufacturing or indirect like optimizations, PR relations, advertising, HR, lobbyists, R&D, IT, etc etc.
And the companies keep succeeding so clearly they must be somewhat right.
I'm about as pro-capitalist as it gets but imo this is the wrong model for zero-sum (for example advertising) and negative sum (for example compliance) industries. Especially large, already successful companies can secure their position by burdening everyone with enough extra costs that only they can shoulder well enough due to scale.
I think Boeing have pretty conclusively demonstrated that compliance in safety-critical high-end manufacturing is not, in fact, uniformly negative sum.
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