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Comment by Nbox9 | Hacker News Reader

Is it viable for every country to produce all of it’s own basic necessities — food, medicine, energy, fresh water, building materials? Is it desirable?

I believe that the US being a net exporter of food, and a net importer of medicine is an acceptable situation. I think that to frame out ‘reliance’ on India and China for medicine ignores China’s ‘reliance’ on the US for soybeans, or India’s reliance on US warships in the Indian Ocean for strategic defense. We are codependent, and that codependency is going to keep us all from killing each other again.

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I fully agree with your last sentence. But I think that nobody is seriously arguing that the US or European countries should become autarchies and produce _everything_ themselves again. (That whole "decoupling from China" is considered unfeasible and highly disruptive/dangerous at least by EU officials that I have personally heard from.) Instead, certain products and production capacities should be preserved at a minimum level. This is economically unprofitable but can save your country's collective butt in an emergency if it's properly managed and production can be ramped up quickly by getting a network of companies to switch their production (eg masks). I would expect my government to think about these long-odds, high risk events and take measures to prevent them or at least mitigate them. More traditional examples of this kind of thinking are strategic stockpiles of oil, food etc. If the covid-19 pandemic has shown one thing, it's that just in time manufacturing and globalized highly-optimized supply chains can fail spectacularly.

It seems to me to be too large of a correction against ‘highly-optimized supply chains’ to assume that at any time we’ll suddenly need a 100x supply of any medicine in the WHO List of Essential Medicines and that we’ll need this emergency supply of medicine while the world supply chain is disrupted. This is essentially the ask of the article, when it references the sudden need for Hydroxychloroquine.

Should we have emergency stockpiles of food, water, medical equipment, energy, and shelters? Absolutely. Let’s remember that any inefficiencies in our manufacturing base serve to make us less competitive internationally and raise the prices that consumers spend. There’s only so much emergency preparedness we can reasonably expect.

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