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Comment by GardenLetter27 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's already been like this in a lot of Europe where there is no De Minimis exemption.

E.g. in Sweden, PostNord has a government granted monopoly and charge about $20 per imported package, which adds up fast.

It really sucks, free trade and competition is what we need.

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This is not correct. There absolutely is a De Minimis exemption for tariffs. You always have to pay VAT, which you didn't always have to do before. You also don't have to pay that fee, you can order from a store that supports IOSS. The big ones do nowadays. You can also choose to declare the package yourself, but you need to live close to a tariff declaration office for this to be feasible. You can also have it delivered through a different delivery company, they usually declare it for you.

You often can't choose though:

https://www.tullverket.se/en/startpage/private/online/shoppi...

> When purchasing via an e-commerce platform, you can sometimes choose which forwarding agent is to send your parcel. However, when Chinese postal services are the forwarding agent, Postnord automatically handles all mail-order parcels in Sweden.

So you end up with a big markup either way - either on the PostNord / Tullverket side, or on the delivery side.

Why didn’t someone just set up domestic manufacturing for those hobbyist parts?

Comparative advantage

Is this sarcastic? It does read like it.

I’ll take it on face value:

Cause domestic manufacturing for hobbyist parts is not economically viable

I wonder how that additional cost breaks down. Is it mostly cost of labor? Supply chain access? Environmental controls and compliance? Other overheads not present in China? Is economically viable production possible in the US?

For hobby parts? It’s not viable because you’d be setting up a manufacturing operation to serve a small number of people. The fixed costs would be so high you’d never get it back.

Contrast that with someone setting up an operation to serve the entire world, a market 1000 times larger than many localities.

If you're smart enough to design and build a LIDAR, you're smart enough to make $200,000 a year working for the big adtech companies.

You'd need an enormous hobbyist robotics market to be able to sustain a business making and selling $60 LIDARs with that wage bill.

Sweden as an example is 10 million people. The world is 8000 million, 800x larger. The affluent parts of the world are somewhere between 100-1000 million, so the market potential is 10-100x larger. If one is able to address the global market, the economy of scale around manufacturing will be heavily in favor of that. This is particularly true for hobbyist stuff, because it tends to be both (relatively) low volume and low margin. And also price sensitive, in that people might just adjust their hobbies based on what is affordable/not.

This is just demand side. Of course producing in Sweden will be more expensive than in China - for electromechanical things, Shenzhen is likely better on every single metric...

Assuming this wasn’t sarcasm: For many hobbies the parts come from all over the world. You can’t expect hobbyists in every country to set up manufacturing for every part.

Even if they did, the raw materials have to come from other countries. The machines probably come from other countries. Setting up little factories all over the world isn’t efficient so prices would be extremely high. Parts might be cheaper importing from other countries even with extreme tariffs.

It’s all just a mess of bad policy. We lose out when governments restrict our ability to make small, simple purchases from other countries without heavy cost overhead.

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