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Comment by breatheoften | Hacker News Reader

Quite interesting -- German government wants to keep the valuable parts of future manufacturing processes in Germany whereas the companies don't care where their future manufacturing value comes from and will remain more interested in optimizing for their current revenue stream for some amount of time in terms of how they deal with the German governments. That revenue will eventually disappear though ... I wonder if they could put a hefty tax on the gas powered cars but offer a rebate for that tax for every electric car sold that is proportionate to the amount of the electric car value that was domestically produced. Investment in domestic electric car production would then become a direct mechanism for preserving their existing revenue stream while forcing them to set themselves up for domestic production of electric cars in the future ...

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I'm surprised how short sighted these car manufacturers are. The German government seems right here: Germany derives a lot of value from owning (large parts of) the supply chain of the car industry. However, the car industry itself also benefits immensely from having so many high quality suppliers close by. One would think that forward looking CEOs want to ensure that this capability remains intact.

I am pretty sure that would violate a lot of international trade agreements.

Unfortunately China seems to be engaged in exactly the same sort of behaviour. 1 in 7 cars has to be electric (fair enough), but the electric car has to be manufactured by a company owned by Chinese citizens. It's a pity that Donald Trump is going to dismantle the multilateral attempts to make China play by the same rules as everyone else.

If that's all the TPP were about, it wouldn't be so dreadful or maligned by so many people.

That would be something I could support.

Yes, fair enough, there were a lot of problems with it. The issue is I think Trump is opposed not just to the detail of the proposed deal, but to multilateral deals in general, presumably because he feels it means the US is bound by globalist institutions. But the US or Europe, or Japan, or any of the other countries involved in these deals, cannot accomplish a goal of preventing something like this on their own. They have to join together, and joining together means being bound by jointly created rules. In order to meet these goals, the US has to accept a role not just as a leader but also as one member among many (a role commensurate with a population and economy perhaps 15-30% of the total rather than as a hegemon talking to a minor ally).

I'm from the midwest (originally). The problem with any trade deal is that the middle class was told that it was going to be good for them and it wasn't. Yes, you can say they should have thought about it and they could have seen that trade deals even out labor costs but nobody told them that.

So today, any trade deal is viewed as "here we go again" no matter what the actual content says.

I think that's a fair point. There needs to be a lot more thought put into how trade deals can benefit the whole of society, and what social and political structures you need to help ordinary people prosper under those circumstances. Worth pointing out that there are also a lot of benefits for them as well. And I'm not sure we have a choice, global trade is clearly more efficient, individually countries will just be routed around if they isolate themselves, and if we managed a global shift towards protectionism we would serve to reduce global growth and probably increase conflict as more people struggle (in our own countries as well).

You'd think it would, but they're probably more arbitrary and less ideal than you would imagine them to be. For example, here in America we speak loudly about the importance of free trade, but we have a rather absurd number of cases where we don't allow it: we have ridiculous tariffs on things like cheese, sneakers and automotive parts. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that would violate international trade agreements.

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