With the odd story that we paid the price for it in the long term.

This book

https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi...

tells the compelling story that the Mellon family teamed up with the steelworker's union to use protectionism to protect the American steel industry's investments in obsolete open hearth steel furnaces that couldn't compete on a fair market with the basic oxygen furnace process adopted by countries that had their obsolete furnaces blown up. The rest of US industry, such as our car industry, were dragged down by this because they were using expensive and inferior materials. I think this book had a huge impact in terms of convincing policymakers everywhere that tariffs are bad.

Funny the Mellon family went on to further political mischief

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife#Oppositi...

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vondur 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ha, we gutted our manufacturing base, so if we bring it back it will now be state of the art! Not sure if that will work out for us, but hey their is some precedence.

	▲	kelseyfrog 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The dollar became the world's reserve currency because the idea of Bancor lost to it. Thus subjecting the US to the Triffin dilemma which made the US capital markets benefit at the expense of a hugely underappreciated incentive to offshore manufacturing. You can't onshore manufacturing and have a dollar reserve currency. The only question then is, Are you willing to de-dollarize to bring back manufacturing jobs? This isn't a rhetorical question if the answer is yes, great, let's get moving. But if the answer is no, sorry, dollarization and its effects will continue to persist.
	▲	jacquesm 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This is the silver lining in many bad stories: the pendulum will always keep on swinging because at the extremes the advantage flips.

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hansvm an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'll take a look at that story later. I'm curious though, why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the processes are inferior? When I use wrenches, bicycle frames, etc from most other countries I have no end of troubles with weld delamination, stress fractures compounding into catastrophic failures, and whatnot, even including enormous wrenches just snapping in half with forces far below what something a tenth the size with American steel could handle.

	▲	jacquesm 13 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I'm curious though, why is US metallurgy consistently top-notch if the processes are inferior? I really wonder what you're comparing with. Try some quality surgical steel from Sweden, Japan or Germany and you'll come away impressed. China is still not quite there but they are improving rapidly, Korea is already there and poised to improve further. Metal buyers all over the globe are turning away from the US because of the effects of the silly tariffs but they were not going there because the quality, but because of the price. The US could easily catch up if they wanted to but the domestic market just isn't large enough. And as for actual metallurgy knowledge I think russia still has an edge, they always were good when it came down to materials science, though they're sacrificing all of that now for very little gain.
	▲	nine_k an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Which are these other countries? Have you tried something actually made in Japan, or in Germany, for instance? What you describe seems like very cheap Chinese imports fraudulently imitating something else.