I don't think it's a matter of willingness, but simple global geo economics.
There's places where producing A, whatever A is, is economically more efficient for countless reasons (energy prices, logistics, talent, bureaucracy, cost of labor, etc).
That's not gonna change with whatever investment you want or tariff you put.
But the thing I find more absurd, of all, is that I'd expect HN users to be aware that USA has thrived in the sector economy while offloading things that made more sense to be done elsewhere.
I'd expect HN users to understand that the very positive trade balances like Japan's, Italy's or Germany's run are meaningless and don't make your country richer.
Yet I'm surrounded by users ideologically rushing into some delusional autarchic dystopia of fixing american manufacturing for the sake of it.
That's a narrow perspective. The "benefits" that are granted to a country have a cost and these costs need to be reconciled with on the international stage. This is achieved through tariffs otherwise the playing field isn't fair.
Doesn't that feel like a massive overstatement? They have worse working conditions for sure. "Enslavement" is absurd if we are speaking about the macro level.
The other side of this coin is cost of living. If housing costs more in the US, so does everything else. If everything costs more, people have to be paid more in order to make a living, and that makes the US less competitive in the global labor market.
US corporations benefit today from slave labor by people housed in for-profit prisons where there are incentives to over-prosecute brown and poor people. These include, but aren't limited to:
Literally forced labor camps. Of course, the PRC denies these allegations, but it certainly seems like there's some forced labor due to the numerous reports across many years of a variety of forced labor operations from these camps.
The US has forced prison labor. We can talk about how bad the Chinese government is, but their economy is not built on forced labor anymore than the US is built on prison labor.
I also think any form of forced work in the US prison system is pretty awful, but don’t try to equivocate Chinese “reeducation” camps with regular prison. Not anywhere close to the same thing.
Have you asked any of the inmates at the Angola "working farm" in Louisiana?
Apparently 63% are serving life terms, 27% more than 20 years.
Doesn't seem worse than China's attempt to iron out a seditious, violent sub-culture that was actually detonating bombs amongst civilians? Most seem to have closed, so the maximum term < 10 years.
Neither are good ideas IMHO - but one way worse than the other? Come now.
> Neither are good ideas IMHO - but one way worse than the other? Come now.
Inmates in any prison in the US ostensibly have gone through due process and were convicted of their crimes. You can argue about whether the US justice system is truly fair, but it's (at least in historic years) certainly more fair than rounding up large portions of a specific ethnic minority for 'reeducation'.
This doesn’t entirely prove that China is much worse off than the US here, since we appear to be comparing. It’s pretty clear that US has a lot of room for improvement at 3.3/thousand people compared to China’s 4.
I don't think it's a matter of willingness, but simple global geo economics.
There's places where producing A, whatever A is, is economically more efficient for countless reasons (energy prices, logistics, talent, bureaucracy, cost of labor, etc).
That's not gonna change with whatever investment you want or tariff you put.
But the thing I find more absurd, of all, is that I'd expect HN users to be aware that USA has thrived in the sector economy while offloading things that made more sense to be done elsewhere.
I'd expect HN users to understand that the very positive trade balances like Japan's, Italy's or Germany's run are meaningless and don't make your country richer.
Yet I'm surrounded by users ideologically rushing into some delusional autarchic dystopia of fixing american manufacturing for the sake of it.