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What of the usual economic arguments against this sort of thing?
That is: why keep investing national resources in a less profitable (as the markets tell us) industry rather than better ones?
Even from a purely economic viewpoint, international trade is great only as long as there are no supply chain disruptions.
Having at least some industry at home makes sense from a strategic viewpoint. Not only are you better able to handle supply chain disruptions in the short term, you also keep the necessary expertise around. As long as you are making cars, you are also teaching people to make cars, to run the factories and so on.
If the US stops manufacturing cars, and in 20 years' time it turns out the US can't import cars anymore for whatever reason, perhaps a war or something, they will have to restart from scratch. Scaling up is one thing, but if nobody remembers how to make a car anymore and has to dig up old books, and if there are no working factories around, it will take a very long time before anything is produced again, let alone anything of acceptable quality.
You pay for this with inefficiency in the here and now, that's true.
Indeed. I think the question is, if we decide to pay for it, who should pay for it and how should that cost be assessed.
For example, in order to prop up the US shipping industry, the Jones Act creates certain mandates that are moderately inefficient. Opinions can differ on whether the benefits to preparedness are worth it, but there is a separate stream of opinions on whether that cost should be passed disproportionately to HI, PR and to a lesser extent the LA metro area.
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Note that I am not endorsing a high-tariff world view. In general low tariffs are a win-win-lose and thus positive sum.
I am pointing out that Trump is right about Chinese cars and seems to tap into the (fully justified) American working-class resentment pretty well. American factory workers got the short end of the stick. Almost everyone benefits (hey, cool cheap cars!) while they get broken communities and welfare.
I guess what I don't see in this resentment is that the UAW was ultimately let down not by free trade, but by Detroit's perpetual inability to produce a competitive product. If the UAW had been assembling prettier cars with better reliability, we wouldn't be here. I don't see why we'd give the engineers in Detroit another chance to make another fucking Buick?
In fairness to Detroit, all the competition comes from countries that ruthlessly excluded American cars, raised high tariffs so local industries could build strength, or stole all the engineering secrets and profit.
Ok, what does that have to do with the consummate inability for Ford to build a Camry competitor between 2003-2018?
To be fair, some of that is regulatory and/or government policy based- US legal environs definitely pushed towards a more adversarial relationship between the UAW and management than was strictly necessary, for one example, while Japanese competitors mostly didn’t have to deal with that.
The electric F-250 idiocy ford is pursuing is also hard to see with a non-US based company.
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I liked the Focus and wanted one as my first car after graduating, but they stopped selling it before it came time to get a new car, alas.
I think what happened is Detroit got disrupted by foreign automakers. Clayton Christensen's model of "Disruption" is probably too broad and contains too many predictions for me to get into here. But, basically, Japan came in and dominated the lowest end of the market Detroit was happy to concede, then the Japanese got better and came for better markets. Broadly, now, Detroit has fled to the most elaborate high-end markets, and they're stuck making cars according to a failed model that can only continue to die out.
Tariffs alone probably won't save Detroit, but Trump is probably right that a bloodbath is coming for the American auto market.
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Tariff market shortfall should quite honestly be a defense budget line item and it's strange to think that nobody really considers it like that; if not from ensuring a war with external powers can be effectively prosecuted without external supply chains and expertise, then from ensuring a war with internal ones does not start due to economic inequality.
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