Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kredd 868 days ago
Yeah it sucks. We’re trying to play catch up game for manufacturing industry, but it’s abysmally hard to get it going. I don’t think we can easily pour down money and the talent and processes would just reappear in a couple of years either. So, my assumption is high-scale tech protectionism wars are going to start.
1 comments

I think people focus on protectionism because that is the traditional tool to fight things like foreign government's unfair subsidy practices. However, you cant just have protectionism without fostering competition and innovation in order to succeed in creating a more competitive product/market. Example would be USA protectionism against Canada's bombardier. It only protected Boeing but didn't actually make Boeing make better planes, as we can see from all the recent issues.

So I think protectioism is fine as long as we properly setup an environment that allows for and encourages competition and innovation. However, that doesn't seem to be a path we are used to taking .

Absolutely agreed. I do think it will go the Argentina way if/when we start mass banning imports of Chinese consumer tech. Well, unless, as you mentioned we start heavily investing and encouraging local competition. I guess, time will show, but I hope we don’t cut ourselves out of good products just because “they’re foreign”.
> Example would be USA protectionism against Canada's bombardier.

Can you give some specific examples? I couldn't find anything. I'm pretty sure that US and Canada have nearly free trade, due to NAFTA.

Iirc Boeing complained about Bombardier not being US and the end result is Airbus owns them and they make a plane in the US somewhere.