No. of Recommendations: 5
Would you care to guess who Germany's #1 trading partner was at the outset of World War 2?
France.
Right. Incentive not to engage in military adventurism - not an absolute barrier to doing so. If China wants to invade Taiwan, they can invade Taiwan at any time - what the rest of the world does is create disincentives to them invading Taiwan through the consequences that would inexorably follow. Integrating them into the global economy increases the consequences.
You're making the argument of comparative advantage to a degree. That's why I'm fine with somebody else making simple things like mops and whatnot that are easily picked up in the event of a supply outage. But why do you feel that rare earth element processing or semiconductor sourcing is at the low end of the food chain?
I'm not (although we don't import many semiconductors from China). What I'm talking about is that the high end of the food chain requires the low end of the food chain to be nearby. For example, making iPhones or other complicated electronic devices is at the high end of the food chain. But the company making those devices doesn't just need a plant that can assemble the device; they need to be in the same place as nearly all of the factories that are assembling the cheap, inexpensive, and boring components of that device. The plant where the iPhones are being assembled "wants" to be an area where there are a hundred factories that make cheap tiny screws - so that if there's a new model of the phone that requires a different cheap tiny screw with different specs and different tolerances, they can make that change with a single phone call without having to rework their entire supply line and distribution and schedule.
You're literally arguing against the entire history of the United States. There's a reason why we've been #1 and when we weren't #1 we were on the fast track to getting there - we have land, we have labor, we have capital that can be utilized and invested here.
And we've allocated that land and labor and capital and made those investments to the places where they are most efficiently deployed, for the most part.
I'm not arguing against the entire history of the United States - I'm arguing in support of it. Through the period where we've been number 1, we mostly haven't had the federal government coming in and centrally planning the economy to achieve whatever the priorities of the government were, rather than what makes economic sense.
What you're advocating is what runs counter to our past history. The free market efficient outcome for producing nearly all of these manufactured goods is to produce them overseas using low cost labor and eating the transport cost, rather than trying to produce them domestically using either higher-cost labor or automation. If you want to diverge from the efficient outcome and force these goods to be produced here, it's going to take a ton of active governmental involvement and a whole lot of government funds to push us away from the market equilibrium outcome. Which, again, is more the Sanders Solution than the Republican Response.
There's nothing wrong with promoting a resurgence of high-value manufacturing in the United States. There's nothing wrong with weaning our economy off of bad actors globally. I can recall when it was supposedly impossible for the US to get off of foreign oil...yet somehow, it happened.
Yeah, with technology. Not because of any of the things that government was trying to do to force us to wean off foreign oil. If someone developed a new technological process for making t-shirts or tiny iPhone screws or any other product currently being mostly done overseas that would allow them to be more efficiently built here instead, then it would happen. But government can't simply decide that iPhones should be made in the U.S. and have it actually happen, unless the government is willing to commit to commanding the economy and/or providing the funding that would cause that to take place.
China and SE Asia have the high-value manufacturing that benefits from being near the low-value manufacturing and/or is more efficient to provide with cheap labor. If you want to "promote" a change to that, you need to be willing to do the things that will actually make that change. And I doubt very much that the GOP is willing to do that.
