It’s from your taxes (unless the Germans are donating from their coffers), so yeah you should have a local preference if it’s competitive (near as good or better). It adds to local economy and also staves off monopolization of producers.
It essentially accounts to government subsidies for a certain company.
And that's why it is illegal in the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Import_substitution_industrial...
The EU is an arbitrary distinction.
Why stop at the EU?
If Tau Cetians can produce trains cheap we ought to buy trains from Tau Ceti.
Never mind that it puts the locals out of a job, diminishes local pride in locally manufactured goods, and what do the Tau Cetians care if the trains are unreliable and in comfortable.
Economics doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and it doesn’t matter if my opinion is economically factually incorrect: the National morale does matter.
But, if you hold competition above all else, then we have an ideological mismatch, and no amount of fact or opinion sharing is likely to help.
I don't even know how to reply to that. Not only you're completely wrong, but you're a nationalist who would sink your country for "national pride".
Kinda like North Korea.
Won't make it good, but you're still free to want.
Investing in local industry is perfectly wise. A country that has a skilled workforce, good infrastructure and efficient capital flows is likely to be highly competitive on an international level. Propping up industries just because it's politically easy is the first step down a very slippery slope.
Alstom is comfortably profitable and doesn't need propping up. What's more, it is substantially reliant on export contracts that could be severely jeopardised in a culture of protectionism. The multi-billion dollar contracts it has to provide trains to India, South Africa and the US are all under threat if those countries decide "why should we give all this money to a French company when we could build these trains ourselves?".
Protectionism destroyed the British national morale in the 1970s. The country was weighed down with an unsustainable burden of uncompetitive industries, propped up by the public purse because it was too politically painful to allow them to decline. The resulting swing to Thatcherism resulted in a swift and brutal end to those industries - rather than a managed decline, they were simply culled off, with utterly traumatic effects on a generation of workers who weren't prepared for it.
National morale based on an economic sleight-of-hand is a poor substitute for national morale based on industries that are genuinely capable of taking on the world and winning.
And, if we take a global / universal perspective it makes sense to optimise production where it’s most economical.
I guess my wider point is: we ignore nationalistic sentiment to our own detriment, as evidenced by Brexit. We probably ought to consider there is a spectrum rather than an either/or.
What do you mean by this? Could you explain this a bit please?