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Comment by car_analogy | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I buy your logic (why would a less beneficial industry be better at lobbying?), but even so, is it a worse problem than economic colonialism, where no local owned firms can flourish, because the market is saturated by foreign goods by more advanced firms, and the only economic opportunities are working for those firms?

The examples of those successful Asian countries implies that the tradeoff is well worth it.

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What people who are against immigration, especially "economic" migration don't understand that the companies that provide goods in the migrants origin country are in the destination country. If you are in El Salvador and you are buying American trucks, those trucks are manufactured in the US,if you have nothing to export in El Salvador, you have to go where the employer is and that means migration. It is especially absurd in Germany because exporting and never importing means a constant outflow of funds out of e.g. Greece which also means a constant flow of immigrants to Germany.

I don't understand. Do you mean Americans are immigrating to China, given the trade imbalance?

Why does exporting come with the expectation of providing employment to countries who could not build competent industries. I am not anti-immigration, I am an immigrant myself, just trying to understand your argument.

I think economic immigration has nothing to do with trade imbalance, and all to do with quality of life. As an example, India may be exporting more to Greece, but there are many Indians who would rather live in Greece, and none in the other direction.

> The examples of those successful Asian countries implies that the tradeoff is well worth it.

And the examples of many, many countries which used "industrial policy" to implement awful ideas like import substitution (i.e. "developing" towards autarchy, not increased trade openness and market discipline) can imply the opposite.

Of course the state meddling can be done wrong. But unrestricted free trade advocates claim that is cannot be done right - that simply opening up markets is always preferable. That there are zero examples of poor countries that became successful economies following this path, and numerous examples of various forms of protectionism resulting in prosperity, should be a clue to which strategy is better.

> But unrestricted free trade advocates claim that is cannot be done right

I'm not sure that this is correct, the theoretical argument for supporting infant industries is quite old and well known by now. The main remaining question is an empirical one, of whether you think that industrial policy as it's actually practiced in the real world is generally worthwhile. Those who advocate against government meddling argue that it mostly isn't.

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