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Comment by cycrutchfield | Hacker News Reader

Strategic stockpiles seem much more cost effective than autarky.

It is not about autarky, but diversification and resiliency of the supply chain. Automakers are experts at this - BMW cars made in USA (South Carolina) have US made parts and ones made in Germany have locally sourced parts from Germany, yet the ones made in South Africa have diversified sources - both local and international. If you're in the US, you can see this % of locally made parts right on the window price sticker. It's not just for show - if there is a shortage of headliners in US, it can import it for a short term needs from Europe and vice-versa.

No one is suggesting complete in-house isolation aka Autarky, but to avoid SPOF (single point of failure) supply chains - probability of each link breaking adds up when your supply chain is 18 levels deep from an iPhone to the copper mine.

I imagine that unless it's 100%, the "% of locally made parts" is very poorly correlated with supply chain robustness.

If a BMW contains 99% local American parts, it's quite likely that much of the 1% are the hardest things to produce locally.

You can't stockpile everything you could need for every potential crisis. At an individual level, think of extreme preppers that have huge tanks full of water, years of storable food, an arsenal of guns, etc. This only covers a small set of scenarios, but the cost is unaffordable on a national scale.

What makes a country resilient is not stockpiles, although those help, but the ability to quickly switch production to whatever is needed in the moment. Flexible production capacity trumps stockpiles, because you don't have to decide in advance what the crisis will be.

Unfortunately all of the flexible production is now in a country that's accusing the U.S. of deploying SARS-CoV2 as a bioweapon over Wuhan.

I thought before that it was someone eating a bat, but the hard propaganda push is making me suspect something more sinister that the Chinese are afraid will come out eventually, and they want to muddy the waters before it does.

That sounds like more of an argument for ensuring that your supply chain is spread among your allies rather than your enemies.

Purely economically, the west is at a disadvantage because they'd be fighting free-market pressure of everyone wanting the lowest price. Right now, for whatever reason, things are cheaper to make/buy-from China and other Asian countries. From my perspective, there are only 3 options as to how to fix this:

1. Accept and be willing to pay a higher price (for manufacturing that happened in friendly places)

2. Impose tariffs on Chinese-made goods so that the local higher-price is a non-issue and may even be cheaper due to lower shipping costs.

3. Impose whatever it is that makes things more expensive in the West to also happen in China. E.g. environmental laws, regulations, working conditions, etc.

My vote would be number 3. Get the damn UN to proclaim something, impose sanctions and embargoes if they don't comply, kick them out of the UN meetings, blockade their border and punish countries that don't comply with the sanctions/embargo, etc. Right now, we all keep complaining, treaties and stuff gets passed and blasted out on the news with feel-good promises of compliance X-years later, but when non-compliance happens blatantly, no one does anything but complain and half-ass it by proclaiming condemnation, imposing silly sanctions that do very little, etc.

Half the humanitarian and human-rights problems happening right now around the world can be fixed if strict rules were put in place, and non-compliance by various governments was punished severely. We need to stop treating countries as nebulous entities with no accountability. Hold the entire country accountable and watch the dominoes fall into place as everyone really at the end of the day wants to get along and just go about their daily lives. If democracy works for citizens, it should work for countries.

Are they? Meaningful quantities of all critical industrial goods would be incredibly inefficient.

Sum({Some percentage of total use / year} * {Storage costs}) over {All strategic materials}

And remember, all strategic materials would have to extend to things like non-woven fabric to be useful here.

Now do the sum for the protectionist measures that make domestic manufacturing actually viable.

What if you go to war or the other country chooses to impose economic sanctions?

As long as it goes both way, that seems like a good way to prevent wars.

One of the main ideas when they founded the EU.

Yeah, seems like a more realistic approach than trying to bring back jobs from the developing world.

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