Subject: Re: Trade deal with China reached
The parable doesn't work, because we're not talking about either the ants or the grasshoppers. We're talking about the government. The country is filled with ants and grasshoppers. If the ants and grasshoppers are individually making choices that result in an outcome that isn't advancing the collective needs of the country as a whole, should the government intervene in what the ants and grasshoppers are doing? That's the question.

Hey, *you* made it about lib vs. con. I just supplied an analogy on top of it :)

No - the Democratic Administration of Joe Biden didn't think so. Every Republican in the House (other than Don Young) voted against the CHIPS Act; nearly 3/4 of the GOP Senate did as well (including all the real free market conservatives). Trump wanted to repeal it.

And yet that's still called...bipartisan.

Again, the question isn't whether it's an acceptable level of risk

Of course it is. If in the event the Chinese decide to take down Taiwan, then the first thing that happens is those fabs explode. Either the Chinese will wreck them by accident on the way in or the Taiwanese government will do it to deny their usage to the Chicoms. No matter what happens there's a nonzero chance that many of the chips the world depends on would go offline for...years.

If Vietnam were in fact producing steel at five cents a ton, instead of the $800-900 per ton it costs to make it here, it's almost certainly not a smart decision to try to keep domestic producers alive.

See the above.

See if that stands up to the Freedom Caucus or DOGE. Government handouts to profitable ship-building companies? That's not MAGA. Get Musk's boys on them - delete, delete, delete!

You're trying to make this political. I'm thinking about 2027 and a very belligerent China.


So in that scenario, efforts to try to protect a steel industry that had been completely rendered irrelevant by whatever the Vietnamese discovered would likely leave the country worse off than just accepting the situation and stockpiling massive amounts of steel for defense purposes.


Until the Chinese flattened the Vietnamese steel industry and left the US with nothing, that is.