Manufacture in country A and sell in country B. Or vice versa.

But never manufacture and sell in the same country, or the government might try to get you to pay for your negative externalities!

And now, there’s this annoying predicament where as you introduce more laws and more enforcement, you only cripple your own economy and rarely cause any significant improvement along the lines of what you hope. Look at Australia — we have all these appliance safety laws, but all of the appliances are made overseas and there’s no good point for the government to inspect and enforce compliance with those laws. I just bought a generic vacuum sealer from an online shop the other day. It was cheaper than buying at a brick & mortar store, even with delivery, and it definitely does not comply with Australia safety standards.

We’ve killed our local industry, and our economy is suffering for it. I don’t think the answer is to remove the safety/etc laws, but instead to tax all imports enormously. Be aggressive and unfair so that local industry is immediately viable. It’ll be painful, but it’s what most countries need. Comparative advantage turned out to be a terrible basis for international trade.

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danielheath 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

This is what tariffs do well. When you tax a local manufacturer, you impose an equal tariff on imports.

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seventhtiger 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

That only makes it fair within your country, but it doesn't remove the self-crippling effects.

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david-gpu 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

That is why international agreements like the Montreal Protocol are so important.

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revscat 7 months ago | parent [-]

That was 40 years ago. In the interim capitalism has won and democracy is failing. Agreements like Montreal will never happen again, at least not in our lifetimes.

Look no further than the failure of the Paris Agreement and the ascent of authoritarianism worldwide. No one cares about environmental agreements, certainly not those in the rarified airs of billionaires, oligarchs, and other captains 9f industry.

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david-gpu 7 months ago | parent [-]

> Agreements like Montreal will never happen again

They happen all the time. Just look at how the European Union operates on a day-to-day basis.

This and the Montreal Protocol wasn't achieved with a self-defeating attitude, though.

	▲	antisthenes 7 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Montreal Protocol is Global. EU Agreements are EU-Only, and Europe is only a small part of the World, comparatively, and almost irrelevant manufacturing wise, compared to China/India/SE Asia/USA combined. If we're talking about Global climate or pollution impact, the EU alone agreeing won't cut it.
	▲	maeil 7 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> This and the Montreal Protocol wasn't achieved with a self-defeating attitude, though. What's clear is that the attitudes of those of us in favour of such measures has only achieved the opposite is the last decade, as the user you're replying to has rightfully pointed out. Optimism has gotten us nowhere.

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maeil 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

They're not self-crippling, that's the whole point of internalizing negative externalities.

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XorNot 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

...and then the price is added to the price of tyres. Like, where do you think the money is going to go? People can't easily substitute their car use, and there's nothing out there replacing rubber that's road legal, so all you're doing is just adding a tax to car use.

You could do this just as easily with gas taxes, registration fees or any other system.

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danielheath 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

> People can't easily substitute their car use... so all you're doing is just adding a tax to car use.

So long as you don't have to pay the actual costs associated with your car use, why would you _want_ to find an alternative?

> You could do this just as easily with gas taxes, registration fees or any other system.

Registration fees tax ownership of a car, not use. IMO that's... not great; if you want to own a car you rarely drive, why should you pay for everyone else's pollution?

Gas taxes could be a fair way to target CO2 emissions, but (given heavy EVs don't pay them) are a poor way to target tyre particulate pollution.

As a response to particulate pollution specifically, a tyre tax is quite closely targeted (although possibly ill-advised for other reasons, as I mentioned in my comment).

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Spooky23 7 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well the political party going into power believes they have a mandate to go back in time to when things were great.

Right now that means protective tariffs are a fashionable “something” to do.

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CalRobert 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Is taxing car use bad?

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XorNot 7 months ago | parent [-]

Ask your poorer constituents.

I work from home and get paid an enormous salary. I literally do not care. But (1) in turn I make decisions which are purely convenience based because of that disposable income and (2) I'm just one vote.

The message you'll be selling to everyone else is: "hey, that multi-thousand dollar vehicle you use for getting to work because there's no public transport and your job requires you on-site? Pay more money to have it."

Or did the US not just have an entire election apparently determined by the price of eggs and the cost of living?

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CalRobert 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

I can’t really afford a car and take the train to work. It is paid for in part by high taxes on personal vehicles.

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maeil 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

As has been mentioned dozens of times in these comments, do it by car weight. Then poorer constituents do have a choice.

	▲	XorNot 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		You are simply ignoring that there are generally economic thresholds before the best answer is to do something different, and excises and other fees simply modify costs but don't change the overall picture. People with more disposable income have much more ability to make long term, efficient economic choices by forgoing short term gains or even taking losses. It's similar to subsidizing roof top solar panels: there's a not unreasonable argument that this is just a hand out to the fairly wealthy who own houses, when we could more efficiently use that money in a government program to build industrial scale solar which benefits everyone through net lower emissions/prices.

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tonyedgecombe 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Then other countries will retaliate with tariffs on the goods you export. Ultimately we are all left worse off.

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maeil 7 months ago | parent [-]

> Ultimately we are all left worse off.

This is simply not true. Protectionism can have massive benefits. China making it impossible for foreign companies to gain serious ground there independently has been incredibly beneficial, else they wouldn't have done it. I happen to live in Korea which is similar in ways, and here too it's an enormously good thing for the country and its citizens.

The dream that protectionism is bad by definition is truly one of the biggest deceptions in economy of the post-Reagan era.

It's a great thing because it's basically funneling money from global megacorps to local corporations - which might still be huge, but nothing compared to e.g. Coca Cola or Google. This is a positive thing for everyone except for those companies' shareholders, and in a way the US as that's where almost all these megacorps are based.

This is really an important thing to realize, and I can't stress this enough. It's exactly like the EU imposing lots of regulations on Apple et. al. Apple isn't just going to take their bags and not sell there, nor have they raised prices to EU customers as a result of these rules. They simply comply.

Imagine if, say, Germany ruled that to sell Coke in Germany as an international company, you have to set up a 50-50 owned JV with an existing German company unrelated to Coke. You think Coke is neither going to give up on Germany nor are they going to raise their prices. They're simply going to be making less of a profit in Germany. Great for everyone. It has played out this way in every country with such rules in place.

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antisthenes 7 months ago | parent [-]

> China making it impossible for foreign companies to gain serious ground there independently has been incredibly beneficial, else they wouldn't have done it.

Is it actually protectionism that gives most of the benefit here, or just comparatively cheaper labor costs, massive economies of scale (aided by a huge domestic market), disregard for other countries' IP, and a willingness to make targeted sacrifices (e.g. environmental impact) ?

Like if you're realistically looking at why China became an industrial powerhouse, it's unlikely protectionism is responsible for more than a few % of that success. The rest of it is simply favorable factors that I listed above.

> protectionism is bad by definition is truly one of the biggest deceptions in economy of the post-Reagan era

It is just one of the tools in the toolbox of a country, it's not inherently good or bad. For example they way it worked out for USSR and post-CIS countries is absolutely bad. The way it worked out for China is good. But there are multiple confounding factors at play and you can't look at it in such a simplistic way.

	▲	maeil 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		> Is it actually protectionism that gives most of the benefit here, or just comparatively cheaper labor costs, massive economies of scale (aided by a huge domestic market), disregard for other countries' IP, and a willingness to make targeted sacrifices (e.g. environmental impact) ? All of these have benefited China. I was pointing out how protectionism has done so, independently of the other factors. Those were not necessary for the protectionism to be beneficial. The mainstream assumption in the West in the post-Reagan era has been that this is impossible, that any form of protectionism must be a net negative when you consider the effects on all parties involved. Of course it depends on the implementation. Blindly slapping massive tariffs on everything and calling it a day just hoping it will work out isn't necessarily going to benefit anyone.