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Comment by algem | Hacker News Reader

The point is to have a domestic supply chain independent of other nations. It’s becoming vital for security purposes.

Or at least within your sphere of influence, e.g Mexico.

By this way of thinking everything is vital for "security purposes" and you end up with a full autarchy. Food is vital because you can't rely on others to feed your population. And so is energy. And so on. What is really going on though is that the US started a trade war with China and it's just another salvo in this war. Soon the US will declare electric cars from China as a "threat" and ban them, too. Probably the Chinese will retaliate with banning Teslas. On the same grounds, too.

Are you suggesting a country should be reliant on other countries for food?

? Yes, food and energy are vital to national security, that's why we have stuff like farming subsides. But that's not the only thing that goes into an economy. No one cares that China dominated in polyester production. It makes total sense to guard certain key industries.

...What? There is a spectrum of importance to national security, food and energy are very much on the side of more important, so not sure why you chose those as an example. It's extremely reductive to say any country that imposes limits on trade for its own strategic benefit is an autocracy.

Autarky, not autocracy. It’s an economic goal of having an economy that can continue to operate fairly well even if foreign trade is restricted. It’s associated (perhaps not exclusively) with fascist movements, which emphasized national independence from the broader world.

(I don’t agree that hedging against potential action by a single major strategic adversary is a strong move toward autarky, however—if, say, Canada had tons of fabs instead of the precariously-perched Taiwan, I bet we’d not be spending so much money on them)

Not having your country days away from starving if international shipping were disrupted isn't fascism, it's just common sense. Every country that can practically manage to have sufficient domestic food production will do so.

Yeah, of course. I was just correcting the autocracy/autarky mix-up.

Japan and Germany both ran out of energy in WW2.

Energy sovereignty is a good reason Europe needs to be getting off fossil fuels ASAP.

Banning Teslas sounds like a good idea. Maybe the US should consider leading on that one.

You have some points re trade war, that is definitely a thing that is going on.

However, the on-shoring of chip production is especially for military strategic purposes. Right now a majority of chip fabs are all in Taiwan, and within striking range of a country that likes to rattle its sabers. Losing Taiwan's fabs would be a problem wrt military supply.

Onshoring is mostly happening because the disruption due to factory/port COVID lockdowns in China, and then all the issues with ports and canals domestically, made it quite clear that the long distance transpacific supply chain cannot be the only option. At least with Mexico and Canada there are dozens of land crossings that can be diverted to. And if you cannot sell for six months due to supply issues but your competitor can you may as well be a sitting duck.

IMO onshoring is mostly happening at this point because of tariffs. The supply chain crisis is over and has been for a while at this point, but everything coming from China is still 25% more expensive than it used to be.

over =/= could never happen again. and it doesn't even have to be the exact same scenario.

right now the panama is at lower capacity due to droughts and the red sea leading to the suez is a conflict zone.

Yeah, but the problem is that your competitors dictate what you have to do. If they keep their supply chain in Asia because it gives them a significant price advantage, then you're overpriced. For on-shoring to work, you need to be able to survive such a structural disadvantage in the short-term AND the advantage you realize when outlier events happen has to outweigh the structural disadvantage.

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