[shard972]

> Or, you know, we'll just import whatever it is for 2 cents more instead of paying people to do it. Unless you start to make it artificially expensive to do that through tariffs. In which case, you are essentially trying to prop up the entire economy on a house of cards. Which is what got us into a mess in the first place.

What about the negative externalities that come when a country no longer has an industry that many others rely on? When it comes to things like quality and having a stable supply chain, those kinds of things can be glossed over when "it's always 2c cheaper from china".

Steel is a good example, the main reason why china is still banned from trading steel on the open market even though it's so much cheaper is their lack of QA and also their government's lack of market reforms which would prevent china from effectively pumping and dumping on the world market.

Or what about food? Sure you can just import 100% of your food and let all the farmers in your country go out of business to the subsidised farmers from other countries because it makes economic sense, but anyone could see the potential dangers that could occur in the long term that would make such a plan more trouble than it would be worth.

[kuschku]

No matter what you do, the jobs won’t come back.

Adidas has moved almost all their textile production back to Germany, for example – it’s all automated now, cheaper than in China, and the QA is the best in the world.

There is no way the US can ever compete with that.

[lhnz]

Wouldn't it be better for both the environment and local automation industries [0] if we produced goods within the countries that consume them?

Whether or not local manufacturing jobs never come back, I just don't see why you would want to continue with something which seemingly has so many negative externalities (ethical, environmental, as well as a loss of means to innovate).

[0] https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/11/19/industry-matte...

[kuschku]

Well, no.

Production in Germany (~30% renewable, ~20% nuclear) or France (~85% nuclear) or Norway (~100% renewable) is far better for the environment than in the US (~3% nuclear and renewable combined).

Additionally, you can’t produce everything in every country – so producing as much as possible at one place and then shipping it out will be better.

[mrep]

Renewable energy in the United States accounted for 13.44 percent of the domestically produced electricity in 2015, and 11.1 percent of total energy generation.

First sentence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United...

[lhnz]

Big corporations send manufacturing to countries where it can be done for cheaper due to fewer regulations protecting local environments and sweatshop working conditions (China, etc). They then place the products into shipping containers and burn the lowest-grade fuel we can extract from the ground in order to send it all over the world.

It might be cheaper in the short-term and supported by all of the most progressive corporations but the damage we're doing will affect all of us eventually.

Edit: I'm not saying that globalisation is all bad, but in the war against Trump it seems people are forgetting all of the bad parts...