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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   36634 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I noticed there is a slow drible of talk about some of Trumps Executive Orders. I kinda wanted to talk about all of them as a package, and some of them more specifically. I would advise everyone to just go ahead and read all of the executive orders (there are about 50):

https://www.whitehouse.gov/news/

They are generally short, about a page long. The titles are descriptive of the goals, so you can even skip reading many of them. And you don't need to hear about them via a second hand source.

I got the general gist of all of them within an hour or two on Inauguration day (when they were posted).

My general impressions:

  1. I like the visibility and ease of reading these. Its nothing like most legislation that goes through congress that often require a law degree, and an in depth knowledge of regulations just to sort of understand them.
  2. I don't like this continuing tradition of using executive orders to run the government. From what I remember this started in earnest under Bush 2. But its also pretty clear that congress is increasingly non-functional and uninterested in their assigned role in the constitution. Congress has delegated away its power for almost 100 years at this point, granting law-making powers to bureaucracies that are run under the executive branch. So I don't like the executive order - ocracy, but it seems there is no alternative.
  3. I care less about the culture war type orders, like renaming things. I think it is probably good to have them in there from a strategy perspective. Let your enemies exhaust themselves on silly issues.
  4. My favorite Executive order: Restoring Accountability To Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce. Basically people in the bureaucracy are supposed to carry out the will and directive of the president / executive branch. If they sandbag or fail to do this, then that is grounds for dismissal. They don't have to agree with the president or be loyal, but none of this "resist" stuff. It was a little ridiculous that this EO needed to be issued in the first place.
  5. The one that I think will actually personally impact me the most: Return to In-Person Work. I live close enough to DC. Traffic is going to get worse.
  6. Two executive orders have me worried. One is about cost of living: Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost-of-Living Crisis. The actual text mostly talks about getting rid of barriers and harmful regulations. I hope that is where it stops. But populist politicians have often resorted to price controls to "fight" inflation. I strongly hope they avoid that pitfall.
  7. The other EO that worries me is related to trade America First Trade Policy. The basic economics case against tariffs seems air tight to me. Tariffs seem like a classic policy failure to me. The costs are distributed among all US consumers, but the benefits are often concentrated within certain sectors, or even specific companies. I was also hoping to see an end to the Jones Act, but this EO seems like it thinks that legislation is great.

The basic economics case against tariffs seems air tight to me. Tariffs seem like a classic policy failure to me.

I shared this opinion, but Noah Smith blackpilled me on tariffs. The tariffs might be sold as economic policy to the base, but they are not. Its pure geopolitics.

Xi Jinping's economic policy has been very successful in deindustrializing other countries. He has paid dearly for it, and now sits on absurd industrial overcapacity in everything from steel to batteries. But that doesn't matter. The pay-off is huge - not only is half the world absolutely depended on China economically, in case of a conventional war, China could force a stale mate and then it can out-last and out-produce the entire rest of the world, combined.

And just like Xi paid dearly for this policy, maybe the west also needs to pay to counter it. Tariffs will be paid by all US consumers, and it's very possible they will get poorer for it. But that doesn't matter.

The pay-off is huge - not only is half the world absolutely depended on China economically, in case of a conventional war, China could force a stale mate and then it can out-last and out-produce the entire rest of the world, combined.

China is hugely dependent on foreign trade, which functionally stops as soon as they’re in a conventional war with the US. No merchant ship will risk going to China and no merchant insurance company will insure it if they have to risk the most powerful blue water navy on Earth sinking it. You thought the Houtis were bad for trade? Meet the USN. They’ll be reduced to land trade with Russia. How are they going to outproduce us then? China does not have the natural resources for autarky.

China is hugely dependent on foreign trade, which functionally stops as soon as they’re in a conventional war with the US.

The EU was arguing like that in favor of Russia for 30 years. But trade did not stop the Russians.

And for China, your points are true today, but Xi thinks in decades. At that time scale, it's all hypotheticals anyway.

  • It's possible that China gets its domestic consumption off the ground, making it less reliant on trade.
  • It's possible that the belt and road initiative leads to a massive increase in land access to trading partners.
  • It's possible that a variety of maritime drones, drone carriers and autonomous missile boats make aircraft carriers the battleship of the 21st century.
  • It's possible that the US turns inwards, and doesn't intervene in conflicts with Taiwan, or even in conflicts with Japan and India.

In all those cases, the US would want at least a strategic industrial base left at home for geopolitical reasons, and having it would out-weight the short-term loss that tariffs would bring today.

Even if China gets domestic consumption off the ground they're still reliant on imports for raw materials. China imports more than than 3 times as much oil is it produces, imports a little under three times as much iron ore as it produces, a little under 3 times as much copper ore as it produces, and produces less than 65% of their food domestically. They need global trade to keep their industry running and their people fed. You're not going to ship the 14 million barrels of oil, 3 million tons of iron ore, and the 161,000 tons of grain that China imports daily by train.

Those exact arguments where used in the case of Russia. They were far from autark before they attacked Ukraine, but that doesn't matter. If you have your propaganda dialed in, your population is sufficiently willing to go along, you can deal with embargoes and even blockades for years.

Yes, the deficit would explode, quality of life would decrease. There would be rationing, followed by an inefficient adaption of domestic production.

China needs far less ore if they stop being the worlds factory floor. They can mitigate the missing oil by continuing electrification, by relying on Russia to break the embargo and by starting coal liquefaction if they really have to. They have more than enough arable land to feed their population.

They do not have enough arable land to feed their population.

Despite its place as the third largest nation in the world, China falls behind other major food producing countries in terms of the availability of arable land (figure 1). Rapid urbanization, pollution, and uses of land for other purposes have all contributed to a rapid decline of agricultural land in China. The total pollution rate in China’s farmland soil is estimated at 10 percent, and about 2.5 percent of that land cannot be cultivated due to excessive contamination with heavy metals. As a result, it is estimated that the country has a domestic planting area shortage of 90 million hectares. This cropland shortage is expected to worsen and will further undermine China’s goals for food self-sufficiency.

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/July-August-2022/Critelli/

And if you can survive by drastically reducing your industrial output then you can’t use that industrial output to win a war with the US.

It's not even local imports from e.g. Indonesia either, it's majority trans-oceanic. Grain from Brazil, iron and coal from Canada and Australia, etc.
They can't try what Japan did with the co-prosperity sphere, even if they could cordon off the Pacific as far as Burma.

I wonder if they'll try to develop their domestic iron more. A thousand km over land from Liaoning to where the coal is in Shanxi, wonder how that competes with shipping from Australia.

Edit: woah, they're hauling in a ton of coking coal by rail from Mongolia now. , and they've actually succeeded in weaning themselves off Australian imports.

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