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catigula 6 hours ago

Why would we let China pump and dump our economy with cheap goods? We already tried that and it didn’t work.

mullingitover 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Our cheap exports: competitive, free markets maximizing efficiency and delivering value to consumers

Their cheap exports: sinister pump and dump

kev009 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think a national security argument is much more sound than an economic one, although costs are externalized in a way that isn't obvious, i.e. ecological disaster that shipping everything around the world and back (components, assemblies) is, and hollowing out a local supply chain takes virtually no time while the impact or limits of it are hidden until abrupt breakage (i.e. covid-era shortages on basic supplies, wars, or heavy handed statesmen dictating preferential access to silicon or whatever today). That is, every nation has to maintain some stake in not hollowing out completely while still participating in global commerce.

Once upon a time nations understood the issues better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_telephone_switches

catlikesshrimp 5 hours ago | parent [-]

What about the telephone switches?

BlaDeKke 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Notice how many brands there are, produced all over the world.

kev009 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Scroll down the list and look how many there are and where they were manufactured. Economic efficiency would mean only a few vendors.

AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Economic efficiency would mean only a few vendors.

This is a massive lie monopolists tell you to justify anti-competitive mergers.

Increasing entity size has economies of scale (amortizing fixed costs over more units) and diseconomies of scale (bureaucratic overhead, long-distance transportation costs, etc.)

Economies of scale peter out with increasing entity size. Amortizing a $1000 fixed cost over 100 units instead of 10 saves $90/unit. Amortizing the same $1000 fixed cost over a trillion units instead of a million saves less than one tenth of one cent per unit.

Diseconomies of scale metastasize with increasing entity size. Entity size exceeds Dunbar number, language barriers and timezone asynchrony, corporate politics, independent jurisdictions imposing mutually-incompatible legal requirements, insufficient competition compromises incentives for efficiency as long-term incumbents succumb to Iron Law of Bureaucracy, etc.

By the time you're operating something at the scale of the entire planet, having the benefits of scale still exceed the costs of scale will happen approximately never.

kev009 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Maybe.. and "a few" was pulled out of thin air, but these machines were national treasures with immense R&D expense. Think rockets, heavy aircraft, and lithography.. not commodities or software. Having stuff in these categories is kind of "you have to be this tall to ride the ride"

The history is complicated and a side quest to the conversation here, but a free market did play out in the US and became fever pitched after AT&T was hand tied in the 1980s.

A free market means if you can do something better/cheaper/faster, or at least convince other people of the promise, you have a shot. The more that come (think of a gold rush), the potential returns diminish so it will eventually be hard to either acquire revenue/customers or funding for speculative approaches if they are capital intense.

Also, ironic to the conversation, the "best" machine vis a vis when and what, came out of the monopoly: the 5ESS. The Bell System was a reflection of a different culture and values system than what the US has today post leveraged buyout conglomerates and software company monopolies.

AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Maybe.. and "a few" was pulled out of thin air, but these machines were national treasures with immense R&D expense. Think rockets, heavy aircraft, and lithography.. not commodities or software.

Things with a large R&D expense are exactly like software. They have that specific problem with copying. If one company pays to do R&D and the others copy them, the one doing it can get out-competed because they have higher costs, and then there is a lower incentive to do it.

The problem comes after the government barges into the market and tries to address that problem with its inverse by granting the first company a monopoly. Then you have more incentive to do R&D, but only by trading the market for a czar.

The problem you have isn't that economies of scale couldn't support more manufacturers, it's that now other companies aren't allowed to make the product until the patent expires, and in many industries the incumbent will then use the profits from an existing patent to buy up other companies and patents and perpetuate a monopoly that was supposed to be temporary.

We don't currently solve that problem well, but the problem isn't that some things require too much scale. Markets where each of the patents required for a product are developed by more smaller entities who then license them like a patent pool is one structure that works as an alternative.

The actual problem is that governments are too shy about enforcing antitrust laws in patent cases, in part because it's counterintuitive to grant a monopoly on purpose and then prosecute over it. But the way it's supposed to work isn't that. Antitrust isn't about having a monopoly, it's about abusing one, e.g. leveraging a patent on one technology into a separate monopoly on an ancillary technology by tying the purchase of the patented product the other one. Or uncompetitive mergers, e.g. a company that already has a dominant market position in one market buying or exclusively (rather than non-exclusively) licensing patents that give it control over a different one.

We could definitely mess that up less than we currently do.

> The more that come (think of a gold rush), the potential returns diminish so it will eventually be hard to either acquire revenue/customers or funding for speculative approaches if they are capital intense.

"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

If it's hard for new entrants to compete only because there are already so many incumbents, that's fine, because the number of existing suppliers is already large. The problem comes only when there is some artificial barrier to new entrants in a market that doesn't have enough providers as it is.

scns 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Expats and immigrants, as long as we do it it's okay. Only possible when you lack self awareness and therefore can live with cognitive dissonance.

happymellon 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

American cheap exports?

Government subsidised corn syrup in everything.

> Their cheap exports: sinister pump and dump

Hang on, are you just talking about American on both sides of the pros and cons

peyton 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They have capital controls. Good luck moving yuan instead of Labubus.

onion2k 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The alternative to Chinese goods is not locally made goods for the majority of people. It's either Chinese goods that we pretend are locally made, or it's nothing because they can't afford the local stuff.

Cheap good for decades has meant companies have been able to depress wages to the point no one can really live without them. Removing the cheap goods without also giving up massive corporate profits would just mean most people collapse into poverty.

dmix 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nobody wants to do the hard work of developing industry, reducing cost of living and doing business so workers are more competitive, and changing all the rules that make China 10x more attractive for this sort of thing.

They just want to ban even more things.

YokoZar 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If companies have been "depressing wages for decades" how come they're at an all time high? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

People make stuff like this abroad because wages are too high here to make a profit, not too low.

tancop 4 hours ago | parent [-]

real wages in western countries are down because 1. regressive inflation on essential goods like energy is faster than both wages and luxury goods and 2. rent and house prices (= mortgage costs) are up because of corporate lobbying and rich nimby homeowners.

that means if employers want to pay workers fairly they need to pay a lot more than in other countries with a cheaper economy. but even the inflated wages are not growing fast enough to catch up with cost of living. so yeah wages are too high compared to the rest of the world but also too low relative to the gdp and growth rate and corporate profits.

AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> that means if employers want to pay workers fairly they need to pay a lot more than in other countries with a cheaper economy.

"Pay workers fairly" isn't something that companies in a competitive market can choose whether to do. If labor costs are high, they can either pay them, move operations to somewhere else, or stop operating. If labor costs are low, paying more than that would cause them to have higher prices than competitors.

What this implies is that countries with e.g. inflated housing costs will see operations to move to other countries whenever that's feasible, and indeed this is what we see. This isn't companies choosing to do this -- different companies will do different things, but then the ones doing the thing that requires them to have higher prices will be out-competed.

You can't fix that by admonishing them to "pay workers fairly", you can only fix it by increasing the domestic supply of housing and energy.

wmf 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They're banning Polestar cars that are designed in Sweden (I guess) and made in the US... because the car's Google firmware is Chinese-owned. This case isn't about saving jobs (that's what tariffs are for); it's a misguided attempt at privacy regulation.

brookst 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Might want to google “pump and dump”. Serious non-sequitur here.

AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They presumably meant dumping:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

DiogenesKynikos 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Pump and dump" is when Trump talks up a stock he just bought and then sells it.

lostlogin 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're going to be able to compare this new way with the old way. Careful what you wish for.

mslt 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We can’t even make expensive versions of those goods