Subject: Re: Trade deal with China reached
Again - they don't necessarily need to fire a shot to achieve their aims.

Which is better than if they were firing shots.

We don't get to tell China that they have to stay forever weak and poor. Just like America First allows the U.S. to struggle and strive and compete to enrich and empower our country, so too can the Chinese do that as well. It is far better for us if they direct those efforts into non-combat competitions in economic and diplomatic arenas than if they are firing shots.

Energy independence used to be scoffed at, and now is a reality. So why, in your mind, is it nearly impossible to make medicines, PPE and attempt to source critical minerals (and refine them) from somebody other than China?

Because the energy independence didn't result from a government choice to become energy independent. It happened because of technological developments in fracking that allowed it to become ridiculously economical to extract oil and gas domestically from shale. We tried to become energy independent for some four decades prior to that, with the federal government (and some state governments) using regulatory and financial carrots and sticks to try to force an outcome that was different than the market outcome. We failed. Continually. Because it's really, really, really hard to force a significant deviation from the market outcome if one of the major parties is averse to using federal government power to change the market outcome. We weren't energy independent for four decades, because the most efficient market outcome was importing oil for a very long time - and government was never given enough power to change that. Only when technology changed where the market outcome was - and not through any change in government policy - did we go to energy independence. It takes a lot to deviate from the market outcome.

You can do it, of course - but it requires an extremely muscular federal government intervention in the free markets to do it. The sort of muscular intervention that the GOP would never support today. (BTW, like semiconductors, we don't really import much medicine from China.)

You're conflating providing incentives with Bernie Sanders and whatever he wants to do.

Not conflating - just pointing out that merely "providing incentives" isn't going be effective unless they're so massive that we're in Sanders territory. Again, it's not a "good" vs. "bad" question, but "effective" vs. "ineffective." You can provide for "incentives" for domestic development all you like, but unless the incentives are really big then they won't change the outcomes. You need a program big enough to override the economics - real market-distorting levels of incentives. Again, that's the sort of thing from the Sanders wing of the Democratic party, not the Freedom Caucus wing of the GOP.

Again, all of this is possible if you're willing to pay the price. The price, in this context, is a massive amount of federal intervention in the form of industrial policy, regulatory or money or both. It doesn't mean anything to talk about "incentives" or "incentivizing" companies without talking about the magnitude of the incentive in question, the degree to which the government is intervening in the marketplace to get outcomes that are different from the ones that private parties and firms would reach through voluntary transactions. Big changes can't happen without big interventions. And the GOP doesn't want the federal government to have the power, or use the amount of money, necessary in order to accomplish those big interventions.