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Comment by pdx | Hacker News Reader

There are U.S. solar panel manufacturers who were suffering due to the flooding of the market by Chinese imported panels. Is it possible for the man to do anything that won't be seen as evil? If solar is important to you, you should be happy to foster domestic capability, just as we foster domestic food production with farm and dairy subsidies. If you are a big-government type person, as most Trump critics are, this sort of federal level economic shaping should be something you can get behind.

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If the goal is to reduce market flooding by subsidized Chinese panels, why not just apply tariffs to Chinese imports (like the EU does). Trump's tariffs apply to all imports.

    If you are a big-government type person, as most 
    Trump critics are, this sort of federal level 
    economic shaping should be something you can get 
    behind.

This is a fallacy. Here's a similar one to point it out: "If you are a person who likes rainy weather, the hole in your roof should be something you can get behind."

Specifically, just because someone supports the notion of a large federal government to tackle large problems, does not mean they should support the idea of a large federal government for any arbitrary reason.

That's true in theory, but rarely in practice. I'm surprised to meet a real life big-gov proponent that is against government interference in the free market. You are truly a black swan.

I never said I was a big-government proponent, I just pointed out that your attack against them was fallacious.

And you’re repeating the same logical fallacy (false equivalence [0]).

To elaborate a bit, an average big-government proponent might support taxing cigarettes.

I doubt you’d find a big-government supporter who would support banning all goods that werent produced by companies with an even number of letters in their name.

Both of those examples are of government intervention in the market, but one is clearly absurd. Not all government intervention is equivalent.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

   > I never said I was a big-government proponent, I just 
   > pointed out that your attack against them was fallacious.

You didn't? Hmmm, well, somebody did. Either you edited or I confused you with them. Fine, you're not big gov, that's good. You and I are on the same team.

Your strawman refutations are not convincing. I would rather you managed to pull up examples that a government might actually in good faith propose, to attempt to fix a perceived economic shortcoming, but that would still be opposed by our hypothetical (not you apparently) big-gov proponent.

>There are U.S. solar panel manufacturers who were suffering due to the flooding of the market by Chinese imported panels

That's a loaded assertion at best. There were some solar panel companies that failed, but many that did not. According to the Solar Energy Industry Association, these two manufacturers failed because of poor business decisions that left them making products that the market did not want.

There's zero support for the notion that it was "Chinese" flooding, there were manufacturers from many other countries that were meeting the US market demand were Suniva and SolarWorld failed.

   > There's zero support for the notion that it was "Chinese" flooding

You'll have to take that up with Obama then, since it was his administration that specifically targeted China. It's amusing that I'm being attacked by both people who say the flooding was done not only by China and also people who say it was only by China. I think my main sin was implying on this board that Trump did something that wasn't evil.

The Obama tariffs on flooding were back in 2012, not now (and in the original HN discussion on this, I posted about them).

Further, these new tariffs apply to Mexico and Canada, and will likely be world wide, or at least will need to be since there is global competition, not just Chinese competition.

I'm opposed to these tariffs not because of Trump, because of the specifics on the ground. Citing Obama's tariffs and not recognizing that they are different tariffs, in different situations, is needless politicization.

So in lieu of innovation the solution is to tax competitors? That doesn't exactly sound like a sustainable path forward - what would be the incentive for domestic manufacturers to innovate the price downward if there's a safety net preventing any real competition to force them to do so?

They do compete against each other. They also compete with other forms of energy generation. Did you think there was only a single company in USA that made solar panels?

Not sure how you came to that conclusion that I believe one company manufactures panels in the U.S. but, for the sake of argument, if 30% more than foreign solar panels is the best price we can come up with than 1) that's not working and 2) a tariff will not solve pricing it only removes competition. Again, if they do not have to worry about lower-price competition, what incentive would U.S. manufacturers have to lower prices aside from a lack of demand? You seem to only be concerned about manufacturers in your statement and not the general public using these panels.

How about if I'm a globalist neoliberal who's also an environmentalist? "Fostering domestic capability" is nice, let's do that by investing in basic research, not by putting artificial barriers around us.

Actually, the US has an entity called the Department of Energy that does foster solar research. [1] If you're not US based, you may not know about this.

[1] https://energy.gov/science-innovation/energy-sources/renewab...

OK, so if that's really what we're interested in, increase its funding. Don't artificially slow the rollout of solar panels with trade barriers.

The atmosphere won't wait for us.

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