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by halapro
15 days ago
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> 3. Time passes Correct, protectionism still saved the industry for years, it did its job perfectly. Look at the car makers in Europe, they had decades to produce affordable electric cars, even lawmakers pushed their own population to buy electric cars with timelines and incentives, and they still failed miserably. How? Tariffs are a last-ditch effort to buy more time. If you fail to use this time effectively, you will close shop. If you don't have tariffs, you close shop today. Europe sells gasoline shitboxes for €30K when China could easily sell EVs for €20K, Europe (and the US) already lost. |
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This is under an assumption that the alternative would have been eradication of the industry, as in, “if we don’t protect the industry it will go out of business.” In reality, leading an industry to be more competitive is a lot better than protecting them from outside competition in the long term.
What was the economic value of protecting US steel for half a lifetime and then letting it turn into a dead industry? Wouldn’t it have been better for that protectionism to be more in the form of encouraging competition so that US steel companies were still thriving today? If the end result is going to be a dead industry why invest in protectionism at all?
It’s funny that you’re talking a bunch of smack about European electric cars without looking up sales numbers. The Volkswagen group EVs outsell Tesla in Europe. The top selling EV in Europe is a Skoda. VW and BMW are the top two EV companies globally besides Tesla and 4 Chinese brands.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/06/01/europe-ev-sales-report-...
https://autovista24.autovistagroup.com/news/which-brand-sold...