A mandate for government orgs including the military to exclusively use "all domestic" suppliers is laudable but also subject to graft and corruption - companies need to compete to get into the "in" club and admittance will be "gated" by favouritism, political alliance, and whatever grease needed to get you into that club. And once in, you're always tempted to collude ... partition the pie amongst the "competition" while petitioning the government to grow the pie ...

Yes, you _can_ try to regulate your way out of that. It'll result in a giant thicket of rulebooks, laws, procedures and processes. Exactly what a "slim" state would not want to see ...

(I am not sure there is a perfect way out; "extremely strong" gating criteria though tend to always favour the incumbents, and a prescription of "100% domestic all the way through" is a strong gating criterion if I've ever seen one)

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wakawaka28 4 days ago | parent [-]

>Yes, you _can_ try to regulate your way out of that. It'll result in a giant thicket of rulebooks, laws, procedures and processes. Exactly what a "slim" state would not want to see ...

They already operate in a thicket of laws, rules, and procedures. These all need to adapt to the behavior of domestic and foreign businesses to achieve national security. I think my proposal acknowledged and presented an initial set of propositions to deal with graft. It's better to try than to let national security fall by the wayside due to idealism about free markets. I am very idealistic about them myself, but we see our foreign counterparts use this idealism against us strategically. They are not constrained by idealism.

	▲	necovek 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I sense a bit of contradiction in there. If it's universally true that free markets reign supreme for economic development, then how come "foreign counterparts" can strategically leverage that without having a free market themselves? How did they even get to the comparable economic level without them? So I would counter that this is the wrong conclusion. Due to USA supporting and driving the globalization of trade and production, it has remained the "world leader" for as long as it has. Let's remember that USA has 1/4-1/3 of the population of China or India — I would say that the tactic has worked for a long while. Unless you want to claim how USA has inherently more capable and more intelligent people (which I would dispute)? Without this, I believe USA would have likely lost the lead even sooner — let's see how high end tech export restrictions will end up? Will it make China actually catch up sooner since they can't leverage top end tech anymore, and now they have to invest a lot more in developing it themselves? Now, maybe we are at a tipping point where USA does need a change of tactic to remain a "leader" (but why?), but it really seems like squeezing the last ounces of the tech leadership by USA to remain "top dog" for a little longer. At the same time, it's completely normal that countries 3x or 4x the size of it, with improved economic and scientific development, are about to overtake the USA. Do you think there'd be any incentive to go into a war if all the people in the world were as rich as middle class people in USA? I think it'd be very hard to get anyone to sign up for an army, even if there are any profiteers looking to start it. A good world, IMO, is one where everybody has at-least comparable means as the US middle class. That would naturally mean that bigger countries than US are richer than them, and that is OK. I know US people have been growing up with this superiority complex, but really, a lot of historical things have come together for US to be as successful as it was. I believe that all of you HN participants from US are closer in mindset to HN participants all over the world than to some of your fellow Americans. Don't let the nationalism get to you either: you've got good examples of what comes out of people in other countries who fall prey to it (they get abused by their politicians and war criminals, get the shitty end of the stick while the former get rich and avoid any life-threatening drama).