[hakfoo]

I can't imagine that being a compelling sales pitch even to domestic investors.

If Americans are trapped by tarrifs and have to buy whatever domestic-made rubbish is available, and you're not getting a high-quality workforce, why bother investing anything in new designs and manufacturing; hell, break out the old tooling and start cranking out Chrysler LeBarons again!

It's like we're determined to emulate the rapid economic miracles of Japan, South Korea, and the PRC but in reverse. And it's not even out of some principled stand like "we need degrowth to save the environment", but because rich people don't want to pay taxes for schools and infrastructure.

[pfannkuchen]

It’s not a compelling sales pitch to investors anywhere, I don’t think that’s the point. It’s a compelling sales pitch to workers in regions where economic prospects have dropped off a cliff in the past few decades. If you have no personal ties to those areas it may be hard to relate.

I don’t see why this would equate to low quality. Domestic companies are free to compete. Many countries have historically boot strapped industry through heavy use of tariffs. Japan is a great example, their auto industry likely wouldn’t exist without heavy tariffs in the beginning and China has extremely protectionist economic policy to this day.

[hakfoo]

The part of "bootstrap through tarrifs" that's missing here is the "bootstrap" phase.

You can get away with selling domestic rubbish to local consumers when you're a poor country with few options. For an established industrial power:

1. Consumers will not change their behaviour unless you apply punitive levels of tarrifs. A 10% tax probably won't make the customers who have bought a Lexus for their last five cars switch to Lincoln. That's probably why Washington felt they could get away with the huge levies on Chinese EVs (a new market with no established consumer behaviour being disrupted), but didn't breathe a word about Made-in-China Buicks (an established market full of old people who vote).

2. It doesn't grow the total pie very much. When you're Outer Slobavia and just getting your first industrial plants off the ground, there's a lot of growth to be had just reclaiming the domestic market from foreign competitors. But the US is a mature player in most of these markets already. Removing foreign competitors will only buy a few percent market share.

Admittedly, tarriffs don't cause low quality by themselves. It's more that the package deal being presented is "we won't bother making American industry more competitive, since we can just go insular and high-tarriff to create a captive market to keep American factories alive." Even if you win at that captive market, that's a far smaller upside than if they had instead said "we're going to get back on the leading edge of manufacturing and make American products globally aspirational."

[pfannkuchen]

Perhaps the most significant problem with maintaining free trade with places outside of Europe is that the lax environmental and labor regulations in those places make it extremely hard to compete.

If one factory has to operate clean and one doesn’t, who is going to make the cheaper product? If one factory has access to borderline slave labor and one doesn’t, who is etc.

Putting aside competition and focusing on morality, I don’t really understand how people put their head in the sand about the environmental and human damage they support abroad that they would never tolerate at home. The air we breathe is the same air that factories anywhere in the world pollute into, and people in Asia are just as human as we are.

I think a good approach would be to apply tariffs that offset the cost of environmental and labor regulations in America, which would be removed if the foreign countries adopt equivalent regulations and prove that they are in compliances. The state of affairs we have had for many decades now is insanity.

[hakfoo]

Competition still works as long as you've got something other than "cheapest" to differentiate yourself on.

The people who say "I'm buying brand X because they have a reputation for quality/good design/better total experience" can help finance any difference in labour and environmental remediation costs.

You can't win a "I want the cheapest generic 330-ohm resistor" market wither higher cost structures, but you can come up with a lot of ways to avoid having to enter that market.

[taylodl]

That's great except the US economy has been fueled by debt for the past 50 years - and a lot of that money fueling the debt comes from overseas. You drop your compelling sales pitch to investors and their money leaves. I don't think you understand the ramifications of that. We're not talking about boot strapping industries - our industries are mature. They will lose access to world markets if the US decides to double-down on isolationism. That means negative growth for the largest industries in the US.