No. of Recommendations: 14
Your original stance was that China could ride out a Trade War with the US, btw.
Right. But that doesn't mean they want a Trade War - and certainly not with the entire world, not just the U.S. As you point out sometimes in other contexts, it's about incentives. By integrating China into the global economy, we vastly disincentivize them from getting into a "hot" military conflict. Which has been incredibly successful - over the last four decades, nearly all of our global adversaries have engaged in those kinds of hot conflicts and direct military actions (Iraq, Russia, Libya, Iran, etc.). But not China, who has refrained from letting things get to the point of major shooting wars, and indeed has kept their client North Korea bottled up as well.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Upthread you touted the CHIPs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act but here you're saying that massive government intervention is a bad thing. BTW the reallocation of capital in this U.S. into industries and fields that there is no market reason to invest in is exactly what every single green initiative the west has engaged in has been doing.
Sorry I wasn't clear. It might help to think of these policies in an "sufficient" vs "insufficient" framework, rather than "good" or "bad" things. CHIPS and the various provisions of the IRA are useful baby steps towards reshoring very limited specific products, but are wholly insufficient to accomplish the kind of self-sufficiency in critical manufacture that you're describing.
Because you can't do that on a product-by-product basis. It's a massive, "whole of country" kind of undertaking. Competitive labor-intensive mass manufacture of the sort that China does requires an entire ecosystem in order to work. You need a large pool of manufacturing-ready labor and massive transportation infrastructure, both for inputs and finished goods. You need lots of manufacturers clustered in a particular area to create a mutually reinforcing and sustainable environment: parts manufacturers surrounded by multiple end-users of their parts, finished product assemblers surrounded by multiple parts manufacturers, tool and machinery manufacturers surrounded by the other manufacturers who will use their tools and machinery to make their products, and all serviced by transportation providers and warehouses and utilities and the like.
You can't recreate that here in the U.S. by just tinkering around the edges with product specific incentives like the CHIPs Act or the IRA provisions. You might get a small handful of very specific products that are most heavily subsidized to get made here, but they'll always be at a massive disadvantage absent the subsidies. Because you're not going to be able to make a manufacturing hub like Shenzhen here that way. You can't just make the high-value products; you need to get manufacturing of everything up and down the supply chain here. You can't just have a couple hundred people putting in the tiny screws of iPhones (because iPhones are cool and high-tech): you need many more thousands of workers putting in the tiny screws into countless other low-value products, and thousands of workers making the tiny screws (low-value low-tech jobs), and thousands of workers making the screwdrivers and workbenches and other tools for the tiny-screw workers (even more low-value low-tech jobs). You would need a massive reallocation of U.S. capital and labor into a vast amount of very low-value, low-paying, repetitive, dangerous, and frankly lousy jobs in order to create the ecosystem where the handful of "critical" products could also be made here. To say nothing of federally funded public works projects in energy, transportation, and housing infrastructure that would make the New Deal look small.
That vision of America is far closer to the Sanders wing of the Democratic party than even the Trump wing of the GOP, much less the Freedom Caucus wing of the Republicans. Remember, they were aghast at the idea of the CHIPs Act and the BIL - which are small, and the part of that program that's the most palatable for them.
