No. of Recommendations: 1
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.
They may not care.
At any rate, they have a long history of subjugation behind them and they're showing every sign of continuing along those lines.
What do these geographic locations have in common:
-Panama Canal
-Cape of Good Hope
-Suez Canal
-Papua New Guinea
-Soloman Islands
I'll answer for you: The Chinese are parking military assets either there or right near most of these places. For areas like the Panama Canal they're securing influence.
Again - they don't necessarily need to fire a shot to achieve their aims. With a weak kneed and largely disarmed Europe, who besides the US - and specifically, the United States Navy - is going to protect the world's sea lanes?
And before you cite the stat that Europe somehow spends more on its military than the US please go look up the Royal Navy and tell me what shape it's in. How many combat ships do they have at the moment? Again, I'll answer for you: they have 2 carriers with only 1 of them really working and are down to *17* frigates and destroyers. By way of comparison they had 138 ships and 33 subs in 1990.
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.
Indeed. Which is why no one outside of Bernie Sanders is suggesting central planning for the US economy. It's not a thing. It never will be.
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.
No. Far from it.
I'm advocating from taking away the dependency on hostile and semihostile foreign powers that we have on certain strategic goods. The most recent precedence for this is the energy - specifically oil and gas - sectors. It was always lunacy to allow an international cartel of some of the worst of the worst - OPEC - to set global oil prices. Now, does anyone care what happens when OPEC meets? We certainly don't.
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?
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.
You're conflating providing incentives with Bernie Sanders and whatever he wants to do.
Yeah, with technology.
Of course. We excel in this space. We will lean into this strength.
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.
The "Invisible hand" provided an incentive in the form of a profit motive for oil producers to find creative ways to extract oil and gas from previously explored land. Lo and behold we went from "Peak Oil" and "the end is nigh for oil production" to suddenly leading the world in it.
There are many ways to incentivize a company to make a product in the US. Tariff policy is one. Tax breaks in the form of lower corporate rates and encouraging onshoring of profits is another. Reduced uncertainty is another. Companies were starting to move out of China pre-Trump47 due to just COVID alone as people began getting the brainwave that single-sourcing your products is a bad idea.
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.
We don't need to scale manufacturing by trucking in cheap laborers and having them sit elbow to elbow Upton Sinclair-style in some slightly higher tech version of a 1900's meat packing plant.
I'll give you another number: 4,147,000. That's the number of permutations of Ford F-150 pickup trucks that were available in 2016. That's how flexible Ford's flexible manufacturing and supply chain management was and is.
