Bible Lobbyist: We Can't Print Bibles in America Anymore | Hacker News Reader

Bible Lobbyist: We Can't Print Bibles in America Anymore

mattstoller.substack.com

32 pointschmaynard27 comments

Have you considered that the lobbyist is gasp not being 100% straightforward about why bibles are printed in China? I mean personally, I wouldn't base my worldview and my view of American manufacturing on a statement by a guy arguing for a tax exemption.

I don't think the author is hiding that they are citing anecdotes to illuminate a greater truth that has nothing to do with the Bible specifically.

Probably a sort of flamebait title for a site like HN though, to say nothing of being a bit flamebaity once you get to the underlying point too. But under that, if we can manage to find it, there's a topic worth discussing.

Well I agree. It looks like the author had a point to make and didn't care at all whether the evidence he presented actually led to that point or not.

I was hesitant to read the article because I initially thought it was going to be another fake outrage post like the “War on Christmas”.

I was pleasantly surprised.

The more interesting twist is that China is editing the bibles they print:

> the Chinese government is cracking down on the 60 million Christians inside China, with party plans of “retranslating and annotating” the Bible to establish a “correct understanding” of the text.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/13/china-christia...

Hah. I am reminded of a particular conversation I had when I was working in China. Our admin informed us around Christmas/New Years that we had to register with the police for "religious celebration" if anyone wanted to have a Christmas party. We were like, "we can't even have food and drinks/gift giving? It isn't like any of us were religious." Yep no parties that might be even superficially religious. We ended up having regular night out instead.

While I was there it was noted that any version of the Quran which was not in Chinese was banned and needed to be turned into the authorities because only the official Chinese translation was permitted.

If you take the time to read the entire article the bibles are only part of the argument.

> Bibles and prom dresses don’t matter so much, but a few months ago, the head of acquisitions for the Air Force, William Roper, noted that the U.S. had to depend on only two prime contractor makers of fighter jets, down from 13 in the 1950s

Additionally the ending letter was very interesting as well.

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a475971.pdf

    Massive consolidation within the defense industry began after the end of the Cold War.
    According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), the majority of the mergers occurred
    between 1990 and 1998.
    [...]
    In  1993, then Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry held a meeting with defense
    industry leadership to inform them of drastic reductions in future defense expenditures
    and to encourage them to consolidate. That  meeting earned the sobriquet "the Last Supper."
    [...]
    The DoD had a policy that paid restructuring costs to consolidating companies, which
    allowed government and the company to share in the savings realized to the government.
    The policy gained congressional and public scrutiny because it seemed to reward contractors
    for undergoing large-scale downsizing or streamlining of the workforce in the name of
    cost savings (GAO, April 1996, 3). This procedure earned the stigmatizing label
    "payoffs for layoffs" from the media.

That consolidation was their own doing.

Very interesting! Do you think the person quoted in the article knew they were being disingenuous?

He doesn't have to support the policy choices of his predecessors. Actually, the policy that led to those consolidations was ended in 1998:

    In 1998, DoD unexpectedly reversed the pro-consolidation policy
    and urged the Department of Justice (DOJ) to reject theproposed
    merger of Lockheed Martin and Northrop and the proposed General
    Dynamics acquisition of Newport News Shipbuilding.

https://www.dau.edu/library/arj/ARJ/arq2001/Deutch.pdf

Ok so you can't make bibles in USA. That doesn't mean you have to make bibles in China, though. There are other countries that have cheap labor who aren't the target of tariffs.

Really gets down to cheap labour competitive(or anti-competitive perhaps) advantage that make production of some products cheaper and any local offering unable to compete.

If you had a product and both identical, one made in America, other in China, the later one costs half the price, both same quality. How many would pay the extra for something made locally - is it gets down to exactly that and why many local industry has died or shifted away.

Same thing is playing out with high street's and shopping malls with internet shopping. How many of those internet consumers will be the first to moan that they can't pop into a local shop any more as it has closed down.

Consumer loyalty is and always pretty much been price/quality over country loyalty. Ironically brand loyalty holds more water than country of manufacture. For me personally, the last time country of manufacture was a thing was in the 70's/early 80's for electronic goods with Japan having as a country the same level of brand loyalty that Apple has today.

But things change, robots are advancing and production line automation with robots is always improving. You may well see manufacturing comming home, albeit done by robots as that is the only way your going to see competitive balance against cheap labour. Though, how many then will have that ethical quandary about what happened to all that cheap labour that is no longer needed. But then, price/quality always seem to be the main drivers and I'm not seeing that change anytime soon. But I'd love to be wrong upon that.

Put your hand on this holy kindle and swear oath.

>I am skeptical of the Trump administration’s industrial policy approach. But I respect the that important policymakers have noticed we have lost the ability to make things.

As Julius Krein has written about extensively, this goes way beyond the nostalgia of wanting to "make things" again. When we started offshoring, it was under the assumption we would be moving UP the value chain to building more complex and advanced technology, but the reality is we are moving down. The 21st century "tech" job is an Uber driver. That is a terrible thing for America, and I fear that people continue to underestimate how massive a problem it is.

How does that jibe with the reality that manufacturing in the US continues to grow? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

The Fed's information is outdated for an arcane reason. Susan Houseman figured it out - listen to her interview on Econtalk.

https://www.econtalk.org/susan-houseman-on-manufacturing/

Almost all the growth in US manufacturing is in semiconductors.

This wasn't obvious because economists made an accounting mistake when calculating trade flow. Everybody repeated the misinformation from the same source and so everybody is wrong.

In my opinion this should have been headline news for weeks.

For a more in-depth analysis of the same problem, consider reading https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/america-needs-an-... although be warned that it's a bit longer.

Tl;dr The United States literally doesn't have enough physical printers to mass print Bibles (of the same quality as those produced by China, the world's largest printer of Bibles) to satisfy the demand, and doing so would be prohibitively expensive.

FTFY: The lobbyist for bible printing companies says that they could not compete on price if we stopped printing bibles in China, so they requested a tariff exemption.

In the end, the lobbyist is trying to continue to keep a cheap source of production so profit margins from sales are higher. If printed in the US, their costs would be higher so they would not make as much per bible, and any price increases to the consumer would be slower than their cost rise so they kept demand relatively high. (Speculating, but typically consumers don’t like rapid price spikes)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/12/18/the-good-book-... covers some aspects like price of production.

Note that is 2006, but does give you insight and with hindsight, a better idea how we got here today.

I feel like there's a good joke about an atheistic (and formerly Communist) country producing Bibles for a more religious country as they beat them at their own game of capitalism, but I'm too tired to fully form it at the moment.

I mean, the ostensibly Communist country now has a higher Gini coefficient than us too [0], so the joke goes both ways.

[0]: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

Has the definition of formerly changed? :)

No. While the PRC is still nominally communist, for the most part now they just look state capitalist. It's hard to find much that's socialist/communist in their economy these days.

Perhaps that old saying "Could sell ice to the Eskimos" has been usurped. Which is probably a good thing.

The people who buy and read the bible would potentially have to pay a much higher price, perhaps higher than they could justify

I don’t see the issue. Since evangelicals overwhelmingly support Trump, they should be willing to pay the price for his trade war.

Welcome to the bottom where those who speak the truth live XD

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