China blocks rare earth exports to Japan | Hacker News Reader

China blocks rare earth exports to Japan

nytimes.com

3 pointssiculars4 comments

All this over the detention of a Chinese fishing vessel in disputed waters. Anyone who thinks the current situation re. Chinese mining monopoly and I would also include their manufacturing monopoly is a tenable/acceptable situation for the US or the rest of world is out of their minds. I often talk about this and other related issues here and often get some sort of "pro capitalist" retort along the lines of: That is how capitalism works, duh. They make stuff cheaper than we can so we buy it from them. Yay capitalism! And to that I say: Hey gang, I'm pro capitalist as well. Yet I would submit that, in fact, China is capitalist in the same way that Obamacare makes the US socialist[1].

Washington loves to regulate and it seems we are in a new golden age of regulation. Where are the laws that mater? The laws that say we need to have domestic, or at the very least allied, resources of production for critical industrial materials? This is a big country. We have lots of resources[2]. Someone is actually gonna tell me that with all our technology we can not dig holes in the ground cheaper than the Chinese? I realize they have unlimited near zero cost labor. But we supposedly have technology. Don't we? So it is ok we ultimately consume these rare earth ingredients brought to us on the backs of Chinese slave labor? There is so much wrong here it makes me ill.

What happens when the US gets into a real argument with China re. DPRK, Taiwan, Iran or any of a number of Chinese interests in Africa? All the toys that we love so much and much of the materiel we need to prosecute our interests overseas come from China. What kind of Super Power are we then? The paper tiger kind.

[1] It does not.

[2] Same goes for oil and gas. Make more here, buy less there. And If we don't have enough oil, make whatever you can run on gas. Oh, that costs money? So? We are spending a ton of it on "recovery" anyway, so lets do it right.

Despite the name, rare earths are actually fairly common; they are expensive and seldom mined elsewhere because the processing equipment to separate them from the ore is expensive and because rare earths almost always occur naturally in deposits mixed with radioactive thorium and uranium. Processing runs the risk of radiation leaks [...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didymium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samarium

Japan also said they found replacements but costs way more to reproduce... Here comes the trade war

They have also been stockpiling. Which is a good buffer, but ultimately only that. This should be a wakeup call that you can not have sole source production of critical material under the control of what is nominally your enemy. Also, national security issues (which I view this as) should not be subject to cost constraints on the same scale as standard capitalist concerns.

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