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Comment by DaveMcMartin | Hacker News Reader

It’s genuinely sad to see the world splintering into waves of nationalistic protectionism.

Not long ago, we had something promising, a slow but steady crawl toward a united global community. Progress was gradual, sure, but it was real. Countries could specialize and trade freely: I’d buy your chips, you’d buy my steel, and we’d both come out ahead. It worked.

Now, though, it’s all about "national sovereignty" and "independence" as if going it alone could ever match the strength of interdependence.

The trust we built feels shattered and TBH it’s hard to imagine it being rebuilt anytime soon, if ever.

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Maybe. But, isn't the EU a large collection of countries? Meaning that it isn't about updating the free trade of the West; it's about rejecting the US which turned into a not-a-friend seemingly overnight. As a Canadian and a European, I'm going outside my way to not buy from the US. I used to boycott Nestle but if Canadian Superstore has only Nescafe or something from the US, I'm going for Nestle.

Except that friend has been paying to defend off bullies it's entire life with little reciprocity. And when they do, all those friends give them a hard time. The US can't win here, they either meddle too much or "not-a-friend". Meanwhile the US has maxed out it's credit cards and risks paying for it's own bills. Pick one.

The problem was that the people that benefitted most from free trade never do the work to ensure that a fair share of the profits went to the working class who were now being displaced. If you can no longer get lifelong middleclass job with a high school diploma, but you need a degree, then the degree should be paid for by the state... or you see what you see, a race to the bottom and then a backlash.

There are plenty of worker owned businesses. If this leads to more worker prosperity then the free market should push workers into them and to form them. They are free to do so, so what gives?

"It's called consolidation. Strengthen governments and corporations, weaken individuals. With taxes this can be done imperceptibly over time."

Sure but if worker own businesses generate more profit for workers then the workers can use that wealth to buy, I mean lobby and later employ, officials just like other businesses no? I don't see why they cant do all the same corrupt regulatory capture stuff.

This seems circular, since there are no credible authorities to decide what is “a fair share” or not, other than the political process in the first place.

(And then only in the ideal perfectly spherical cow world where single issue voters don’t exist…)

I think fair can be refined to a middle class lifestyle where after working for 30 years you can have your house paid odd and enjoy the final third of your life in retirement having healthcare coverage the whole time.

While nailing down all the particulars can be daunting I think the basic sketch as above is what people mean most of the time pretty uncontroversially.

Did you fully read my comment?

This doesn’t make sense as a response… you can’t gain that kind of credibility just by stating opinions.

And even if millions do so, it’s still just talk, unless consistently reflected at the ballot box.

The greatest number of people benefiting from free trade in this instance have been Chinese. Within America, the beneficiaries seem to have been farmers - China is a major US export market as well as an import market, people keep forgetting these things have two sides.

Tariffs unlikely would benefit working class either. Benefits likely will be captured mostly by business owners (in protected by tariffs sectors) while everyone will get higher prices (which will hit peoples with low income the most). Manufacturing is more automated nowadays (than it was in the post WW2 era) so it will bring a small number of jobs (copare to the US population) and many of them will require a degree (or certfication).

> It’s genuinely sad to see the world splintering into waves of nationalistic protectionism.

And baffling that the country leading the charge on the splintering is the one with most to gain/lose.

Feels like selfharm on scale of brexit

Turns out capital without borders ruins prices for scarce things (like housing) everywhere.

Housing is a fundamental human right.

Corporations should not be allowed to buy or hold large amounts of residential property or zoned housing land. They create artificial scarcity by holding it back, driving up prices purely for profit.

A less direct but still effective approach is to restrict residential property purchases to citizens. This helps prevent international hedge funds and (sovereign) wealth-funds from monopolizing the housing market.

Some of the most affordable housing markets in the world, such as Austria, implement these policies—alongside strong state-led housing initiatives.

Rich people have smart folks whose job is to think ways to avoid regulation.

In your example they would probably just have puppet citizens who buy land on their behalf. Sure the cost would be a bit higher because the puppets would demand some commission, but hey it’s the cost of running business.

It’s close to impossible to regulate concentrated money. See the drug cartels or Musk as two examples. The cartels operate their own army in South America completely ignoring government regulation. Musk bought an entire gov for himself.

While I can understand your cynicism, and I know the reality of loopholes, it would make it much harder.

Also, consider the more "puppets" needed, they less stable the system becomes, and the more likely a "puppet" exposes the system (as whistleblowers in the mafia).

In any case, the thinking can't be "it's too hard, we can't do anything anyhow" because then society is really f-ed and the rich get what they want: hopelessness and conformity.

Again, there are examples of northern & Scandinavian countries that did this with great results. It's just a matter of pushing through.

>> Housing is a fundamental human right.

No it's not. A fundamental human freedom is to build or to buy a house. Nobody is owned a house.

Please read: We are talking about housing, which is not ownership.

I’d argue most of the cost of scare housing is supply limits imposed by ridiculous over regulation of new construction. It’s not like we forgot how to build houses and apartments we just aren’t allowed to.

Nah, 2d space is finite. If you flood an “island” (desirable location) with demand then prices can only go up. We are building skyscrapers in manhattan for over a century so what? Rent is still $5k and $1000 per sq ft to buy.

It doesn't matter if you build skyscrapers for over a century if you don't build enough of them. The only places in the country where rent is actually going down is where housing is actually being built in any significant numbers. Austin builds more homes in a week than San Fransisco does in an entire year.

Rent is 5k because the supply isn't meeting the amount of demand.

This is 1000% true. Owner builder DIY building is basically unregulated where I live. I built a 600 sq ft house for like $40,000 last year. I have a plan that works, but either no one believes me or they spend all their time looking for ways that it fails rather than how they can succeed.

Even if you could build as you please, the labour costs still make up the large marjory of the cost of the home. There isn't a whole lot of room for the costs to come down.

That is unless you destroy the price of labour... Which undoing the global economy will help with.

When I bought my land the #1 driver of cost was either covenants (basically irreversible burden written by now dead boomers in the 80s who were furious someone would build anything but a mansion next to their mobile home pig farm) or zoning. I knew I needed to build as small as possible to keep prices down, so I had to find a needle in a haystack of someplace without onerous covenants or zoning but with some way to establish or create utilities. Everyone was wanting 1000+ sq ft houses on their vacant desert shithole land.

Just water and electric can be a nightmare. I lucked out buying an unproven already drilled old well that was grandfathered in, but if not you have to deal with hoping you'll be allowed to drill or access water and costly regulation for that. Same story with electric. I finally got it, after paying the coop to run new poles down the road, but only after a long fight with another company that kept asking for endless paperwork and expensive surveys that they later admitted weren't even needed. And then there is septic. I found a guy who used to be the county inspector to navigate that for me, but without connections you can get yanked around into all sorts of expensive hurdles or overengineering.

And this is all before you even break ground.

Land is something else entirely, though.

That is an insane assertion, does your house stand on a cloud without plumbing or electricity? Some places require a plan for water and septic on your land before they'll even approve a house.

Realistically, I would not have been able to own my car, which is rapidly depreciating to nothing, without my land on which to park it. Are you suggesting that I should start telling people that my car is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? I'm quite sure I'll get a lot of funny looks, and probably some angered questions from my financial associates, if I heed your advice, even if it is actually true under some sort of accounting methodology.

You are right that in practice a house requires land, but that does not mean that houses and land are the same thing. Especially given the context here about being able to build where you please, which explicitly took land constraints out of the equation.

You don't seem to understand how land works in the US. Owning land is more like a license to do certain things in a certain place. Part of that is the license and infrastructure that forms a house. Land is part of the house.

Your argument is totally disingenuous and pedantic, you will be sued for fraud if you sell a house to someone and rip out the septic system and the soil underneath the footing and make this argument. In your car analogy, a house without a deed is like a car without a title, you don't own it in any useful sense.

> you will be sued for fraud if you sell a house to someone and rip out the septic system and the soil underneath

If the agreement includes the land, septic system, etc., then sure, absolutely. Likewise, I could also sell my car with the driveway it is currently sitting on, given a willing buyer, and it would equally be fraud if I ripped up the driveway. Lawyers can draft up all kinds of different agreements as far as your imagination, and another willing party, can take you.

But it is not unheard of to sell a house alone. Granted, houses are becoming massive – with the average home today being twice the size of the average home in the 1950s – which makes them harder to load onto a trailer, let alone fit down the road, and thus seeing less and less of it, but it was somewhat common in the past to move a house (and I don't mean a mobile home) from one property to another. They are clearly distinct things.

But, most importantly, the context of discussion explicitly removed land from the equation. It was posed under a theoretical assumption that there were no land constraints. To keep talking about the land in that context doesn't make any sense.

Moving the shell of a house in my county is illegal without waste treatment, which is part of the house permit that forms the legal entity of a house. And I live in about the most deregulated county in the lower 49.

You could theoretically buy a shell of a house in a vacuum but it would be condemned the second it drops off a trailer. It's not useful in a vacuum, no one talking about housing prices wants a useless condemned house husk.

> no one talking about housing prices wants a useless condemned house husk.

Nobody is talking about housing prices, so... They are pointlessly squabbling over whether or not a house and land are the same thing, when it is obvious that they are not.

>>I’d argue most of the cost of scare housing is supply limits imposed by ridiculous over regulation of new construction

>Nobody is talking about housing prices

Actually we were?

Nobody but you thought land and a house is the same thing. House prices include the land they are on. Unless you are living on the space station or sea steading, the land and infrastructure is part of housing prices.

I have no idea why you took such offense to the infrastructure of the house being part of house prices.

> Actually we were?

We were earlier talking about the cost to build a house. I suppose that is close enough to satisfy your historical observation, but we also moved on from that a long time ago.

> House prices include the land they are on.

It was recognized that we are in different jurisdictions, so maybe things are different where you are, but around here you effectively need to own the land[1] before building the house. How, exactly, can the price include something that doesn't even exist at the time of the land purchase?

Perhaps you are suggesting that once the house is standing and all the bills are paid one might sum it all up and say that is what it cost to get them into a house? Perhaps, but the prices (e.g. the price of the land and the price of the contractor) will still have been observed independently.

> I have no idea why you took such offense to the infrastructure of the house being part of house prices.

I have no idea how you think someone could take offence to a comment on the internet. It is an emotionless venue.

[1] It is not entirely unheard of to build a house on someone else's (e.g. a family member) land, but in that case it is even clearer that the price of the house is not included in the price of the land.

It's crushing Hong Kong was handed over, as they had about the free-est import/export burdens and regulations in the world. Everyone everywhere wants to kill the golden goose and it's mind boggling that the only people that seem to understand this right now is a few emirates and Singaporean quasi-dictators.

Hoppe might have been right about democracy.

Nah protectionism is really important. Globalization introduces dependencies and therefor allows countries to easily exploit others. Globalization is not as good as you describe it.

Does dependency make wars less probable? Genuine question. Logically it should, but I don’t know the numbers.

I'm not sure. On one side, having trade relationships would maybe also contribute to peace between the countries who take part in these agreements. On the other side you have countries that might try and conquer instead of building relationships. There are so many edge cases to this question it's hard to think of a answer that feels right. I am also no expert on the matter. One thing to note though, is that wars are not always grenades and guns, sometimes having more money is enough to get unfair advantages on other countries. It's a big topic.

Depends on the perspective.

A "Rules-based world order" has been the rationale of the West for decades: WTO, U.N., free trade, democracy, countries' sovereignty, etc. But this "global community" was lipstick on a pig. From a 3rd World perspective that was just hypocrisy.

The "rules" were always chosen by the rich countries: free trade but keep farm protectionism against 3rd world's cheap produce, sovereignty but not for Palestinians, democracy but not if Chile, Iran or most of Africa or Latin America choose to have socialist leaders (Allende, Mossadegh, etc), ...

And now that even the rules are not advantageous to the rich anymore (e.g.:China's and Mexico's manufacturing, India's and South America's farming) the rich countries are scrapping the rules.

European here.

To be frank, it’s more about the rest of the ”west” updating our list of friendly countries. It is the US that has chosen to take an ever more adversarial position lately, pretty much worsening daily.

The trust among the rest of the west feels like it instead is strengthening. I interpret both ”buy European” and ”buy Canadian” as more of ”don’t buy from USA” with a thin layer of politeness.

There is no such veneer of politeness in Canada. The sentiment is more 'boycott USA'.

Understood. From my reading of /r/canada I’ve got the impression that you are further along that path. I’ve been quite impressed with the political response to the whole 51st/governor madness as well.

Canada is the canary in the coal mine. Watch it closely if you want to see what's coming for Europe.

Europe is increasing it's defense spending as it should. The whole point here is about countries paying they're fare share for defense. You want to have all the benefits of socialism without defense spending, which is easy when you know someone else will come to bail you out. I'd be pissed as well tbh, but I think it's good the EU controls their own destiny.

Yet none of the Canadians stop using reddit, a US company. Easy to boycott things you don't care about.

Sure they have. And if Reddit charged for use then they would see Canadians leaving en-masse.

> Countries could specialize and trade freely: I’d buy your chips, you’d buy my steel, and we’d both come out ahead. It worked.

It worked until emotions entered the picture. "I don't like making chips. I prefer producing steel. Why do you get to have all the fun?" they've said for decades and with increasing furor.

If you could move freely about the world without any restrictions so that those who enjoy steelmaking could easily move to where the steel is made maybe it would have had a better chance, but even then people generally prioritize location (to be close to family, friends, certain amenities, etc.) above all else so it is likely they would still seek a varied local economy despite the benefits of a global economy.

> "I don't like making chips. I prefer producing steel. Why do you get to have all the fun?" they've said for decades and with increasing furor.

Who says this? TSMC?

Those who don't like their jobs. Hence why Trump's "We'll bring back the jobs you like doing" messaging was so appealing to a lot of people, even if a lie.

Globalism or imperialism 2.0 perpetrated by America? I'd like to see that kind of utopia, but unclear how we can overcome greed, corruption and bad actors.

> "Not long ago, we had something promising, a slow but steady crawl toward a united global community."

How long ago was not long ago in your eyes?

I'd say, the promise of international trade and globalization uniting the world fell apart some time in the 2000 or 2010s with China showing they would not open up to ideas of human rights and personal freedom. The sales pitch for investing in China (from a political point of view) was that we could trade the communism and fascism out of them.

Then in Russia showed that we couldn't trade our way to peace. The idea was that cheap gas from Russia would make Europe and Russia dependent on either side of the deal, and we wouldn't disturb world peace and break the trade. That didn't go well.

And now America wants to but limit trade with their biggest trade partners and closest allies, in the hopes that it'll bring them manufacturing prowess.

My economics professor in 2005, said the world was more globalized in the wake of WWI. I don't know if that was true, but at least they didn't have passports back then.

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