[mschuster91]

There's a difference between private companies and state-run companies / authorities.

When a US airline thinks it's better for them to switch over to Airbus, by all means do so, that's competition.

But taxpayer money should not be used to prop up other countries' economies unless explicitly designated that way (e.g. contributions to international agencies, economic aid), and certainly not if that replaces domestic union labor.

[jltsiren]

Taxpayer subsidies to domestic entities should also be explicit.

Public sector organizations should focus on their operational requirements when deciding what to buy. When a transit agency wants to buy buses, it should not pay extra due to unrelated policy goals. If the best option is foreign, and there is an equivalent but more expensive domestic option, the price the agency pays should be the price of the foreign option. If politicians want to subsidize domestic labor, they can tell the transit agency to choose the domestic option and pay the rest from an appropriate budget.

[myrmidon]

I disagree with this.

You are basically asking taxpayers to fund an uncompetitive (i.e. wasteful) local industry.

I think that's justifiable when you have high local unemployment (making the thing a job program, really), or when you really need the industry for strategic reasons (food and weapon manufacturing), but when that is not the case, doing this raises labor costs in general and hurts your actually useful and globally competitive industries, too.

[mschuster91]

The thing is, fundamentally there is very little difference between a truck, a bus and a tank. A big ass diesel engine and literal tons of steel. And in war time, you can convert the bus and truck manufacturing facilities into making tanks and airplanes.

That is why even something as manufacturing cars, trucks and airplanes is vital to be resilient. And in addition, it's bad enough how much of a grip China has on our balls with rare-earth metals, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and the threat of snacking a piece of Taiwan. India isn't much better, they keep buying up Russian oil despite sanctions. We don't need to hand them more economic power.

And yes, resilience costs money. We need to explain that to our populations - and most importantly, we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past!

[myrmidon]

> The thing is, fundamentally there is very little difference between a truck, a bus and a tank.

I can see your point, but I'm not buying this argument for multiple reasons.

First, if you do blanket-protectionism like this, the actual strategic gain per "wasted" tax-dollar is abysmal. You could have just bought those singaporean busses, and spent the money on skunkworks and lithium mine subsidies instead if you actually needed that resilience and military capability.

But secondly, I would argue that you really don't. What kind of war are you even anticipating where you would need massively scaled up tank production of all things? The US, currently, could fight an offensive land war against the whole continent pretty much (regardless of foreign support), and for anything else tank production capabilities are more than sufficient.

Being independent sounds really good on paper (and looks appealing when glancing e.g. at the European gas situation), but isolating your nation economically has a really shitty track record, historically, especially when you are not sitting on top of a global empire to circumvent some of the drawbacks.

> we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past!

100% agree with that, but I think this is a (tax) policy failure most of all: my take is that in a capitalist society capital inevitably accumulates at the top, and regulatory backpressure (progressive taxation and antitrust law) is needed to keep the wealth/income distribution somewhat stable; the US has been shitting the bed in that regard for more than half a century now with predictable outcomes for wealth/income distribution (similar for other industrialized nations). Redistribution/balancing dynamics ("poor people getting paid for labor") are also getting weaker because unskilled labor lost lots of relative value.

[mschuster91]

> But secondly, I would argue that you really don't. What kind of war are you even anticipating where you would need massively scaled up tank production of all things?

The war we're seeing in Ukraine right now. Europe has by far not enough tanks, especially heavy self-propelling artillery, to counter Russia. And for whatever reason, despite us actually having manufacturers for vehicles, we still haven't spun up large scale production, it's absurd.

IMHO, when WW3 hits, the situation will be like WW2, Europe relying on the US yet again - but I'm not certain that this time, even if the US wanted to support us, if they actually could. Not because of current political issues, but because the factories, the supply chains are all broken these days, tracing back to China far too often for my liking.

> Being independent sounds really good on paper (and looks appealing when glancing e.g. at the European gas situation), but isolating your nation economically has a really shitty track record, historically, especially when you are not sitting on top of a global empire to circumvent some of the drawbacks.

I'm not advocating for full isolation amongst Western countries but for as much isolation from China and India as reasonably possible. We don't need to produce everything ourselves all the time, but if Covid has showed us one thing, it is that each country should at least have important industries running on low scale and people with knowledge around that can be expanded quickly in time of need. The US in particular should know the danger of knowledge literally dying out - what was it, about a decade was needed to replicate Fogbank [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

[myrmidon]

What is your threat scenario? Russia marching on EU capitals? After the showing in Ukraine I'm fairly confident that Poland alone with moderate support could put a complete stop to that. They are still growing and modernizing their land forces, but Russia has plenty of losses to recover from, too.

But I feel that argument almost supports my point: If you think Poland/Germany urgently needs more armored vehicles, then spending taxes specifically on that is way more efficient than subsidising the local bus industry.

Isolating yourself is also straight up painful economically, and you also lose a soft way of de-escalation/prevention. I'm not convinced that's a net gain.

Aggregate numbers also don't look that bad to me from a Europe vs Russia point of view; if you sum up vehicle numbers for European countries the gap is no longer that big, and European inventories are on average more modern/capable, too.

How much growth in those numbers would you like to see to be able to sleep at ease?

[PaulHoule]

The thing is the public sector does have competition. We have a surplus of houses with XXL master bedroom suites in Arizona and a deficit of high speed rail. If they used union labor to build houses in Arizona and non-union labor to build high speed rail it would be the other way around.

If it costs the public sector 3x as much to do things as the private sector people are going to turn against the public sector. Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant. If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.

[lenerdenator]

> If it costs the public sector 3x as much to do things as the private sector people are going to turn against the public sector. Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant. If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.

Given the encroachment of enshittification on the private sector, I'm not sure it's any more efficient than the public sector on the whole.

And in the cases where it is more efficient, that's because there's either less at stake, or people care less. I don't care what Jim at Jim's Quik Lube does with my money after I pay him for an oil change. I do care what the Feds do with my tax dollars after I file my return, and so does everyone else, so we create regulations and policies to keep government agents from blowing taxpayer dollars. Or, at least, we used to.

Now, we've bought into this "the private sector is always more efficient" BS and put a private sector guy in charge, and it's a disaster. I don't want the mechanisms of the state being treated like a company where the guy in charge has his name on the building and always gets what he wants, because the mechanisms of the state are that of force. People get arrested, assaulted, imprisoned, and killed. It has to be more deliberate and take longer.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Private sector knows how to keep costs down, but that's because the incentive is to enrich the people at the top. This eventually comes at the cost of quality.

Public sector sometimes acts like they have infinite money. They'll just print more and drive up inflation while paying lip service to voters and pretending to care during election season.

There's also the massive corruption in the public sector. All the work is actually done by the private sector, but the contract isn't decided on who will delivery the best quality at the lowest cost, no no no. You'd have to be naive to believe that. The actual decision is based on who will kick back the most money (labeled as "campaign contributions") to the people who are in charge of making the decision.

So really, both suck. Private sector will give you a shitty product at a great price. Public section will give you a terrible price with the quality being a complete gamble.

[mschuster91]

The biggest problem with the private sector is that the tradeoff is always resiliency. Be it a product that isn't resilient to damage from everyday use, a supply chain that isn't resilient against erratic governments or pandemics, or the capacity and capability to rapidly upscale production.

[mschuster91]

The problem with rail isn't just labor, it's land acquisition. For the old freight lines that was done centuries ago, now that virtually all land has been claimed by someone it's much more expensive by default. On top of that, California got Musk disrupting everything with Hyperloop.

You need to use eminent domain on straight lines as much as possible for HSR, both to keep costs low and to allow for actually high speeds, but that's risky for legal challenges and even then, horribly expensive at US scales.

Yes, China has larger scales and still gets it done, but they a) just throw money at the problem and b) just do what the CCP wants.

> Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant.

That's not made easier by the fact that many cities just hand one way bus tickets to local homeless and nutjobs that bus them off to somewhere else [1], often to Democrat-run cities. In addition to that, there are almost no asylums left to take care of the nutjobs because a lot of them had been forced to shut down for sometimes atrocious violations of human rights many decades ago. Some areas now (ab)use jails and prisons to punish homeless people for being homeless, a practice that has also come under fire for creating the same abusive conditions, on top of scandals like "Kids for cash" [2].

The obvious solution to a lot of the problems with nutjobs, homeless and drug addicts would be a sensible drug policy combined with a "housing first" policy. Both of that has been tried in the US and in other countries worldwide to a sometimes massively positive effect, the problem is it has to be done federally - otherwise you end up like Frankfurt here in Germany, where Frankfurt pays the bill for drug addiction treatments and somewhat safe consumption facilities, but ended up having to pay that for people from almost across the whole of Europe.

> If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.

It could be at least pleasant and responsive, the problem is you need (a lot) of money to pay for it, and no one likes paying taxes. It's a chicken and egg problem across Western countries - ever since up to the 80s, when neoliberal politics, trickle-down and lean-state ideology took over, public service has been cut and cut and cut. People don't believe any more that paying higher taxes would yield a net benefit because they lost all trust in politicians, and I don't see any way of fixing that - not without a stint of a good-willing dictator at least, and I don't see that on the horizon at all.

[1] https://awards.journalists.org/entries/bussed-out-how-americ...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

[rangestransform]

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/mta-time-clock-vandaliz...

this is the kind of domestic union labour you're up against. american union labour should absolutely at least be subject to competition from union labour elsewhere, including european bus manufacturers.