Comment by SR2Z | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SR2Z | Hacker News Reader

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Except for one little thing: countries have comparative advantage in the production of different goods and services. Boeing is great at turning aluminum and steel (low in the value chain) into jetliners (at the top of the value chain).

Because of this, Boeing gets to make thousands of jetliners and sell them all across the world and America gets to be one of very few places that can do this.

I think you'll find that steel and aluminum are a lot more fungible than jetliner factories. Why are we kneecapping what we're good at for the sake of things that China will ALWAYS be better than us at?

> Finally, I think it’s ridiculous to expect that this nation can maintain its wealth without producing anything.

The total value of US exports has only ever gone up (see above).

I do get the argument for moving manufacturing expertise back onshore, I really do. But tariffs are not gonna lower the minimum wage and if manufacturing is gonna come back to the US, it'll come back in a highly automated form with a boatload of government support.

>China will ALWAYS be better than us

Comparative advantage is not innate. China was a rural country and didn't have a comparative advantage in manufacturing, they developed it and are now a powerhouse.

Nothing worth doing is easy. I don't know why Americans think that if its not easy, it's not worth doing. Americans 80 years ago would hate us for what we have become today.

In some sense of the word “manufacturing” china has several thousand years of experience in silk production. It also has - and had for much of it’s history - a stable government overseeing a high order society. The situation makes a lot more sense if we stop thinking about “the rise” of china and more “return to the historical norm”. There are a lot of other countries with cheap labour and governments desiring to industrialise that have achieved nothing like china did.

I agree with you. Reading the comments here, it’s clear that many people lack the “fighting spirit” for competition and improvement.

Honestly, I’m surprised by this, especially here on HN. This is/was a place where builders congregate. Building new things is never easy. Sometimes all you have is a belief that you can do it. It’s sad to see that go.

China had a comparative advantage in labor costs that they have turned into an advantage in manufacturing.

Plenty of Americans want factory jobs to exist - almost no Americans want to work them. Sure, nothing worth doing is easy, but not everything hard is a good use of time and resources.

I’m sure plenty of Americans would love to work a factory job if it meant they could provide a comfortable life for their family. Unfortunately, due to decades of anti-labor practices, that isn’t possible anymore. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attempt to rectify the situation.

Its not “due to decades of abti-labor practices" but “due to a century of economic progress driving higher expectations”.

Now, its true that there have, within that, been a few decades of regression in tax and other policy effecting a worsening of the distributional situation, such that labor gets a smaller share of the returns that are returned. But even with that, basically every segment of society is better off in absolute terms than when manufacturing was more dominant: working against comparative advantage and regressing on the US’s industrial mix would only reduce aggrgeate output and do nothing to improve distribution. And that's the point, because its a policy proposed by those who don't want to deal with distribution, and in fact want to take further steps to worsen it, because they expect the benefit their narrow group will receive from that will outweigh, for them, the impact of shrinking the total output.

The worsening of the distribution of wealth is exactly the problem. Productivity is increasing faster than wages. That means labor is losing out on economic gains. Your argument is that labor should just accept this because “at least they’re better off than before.”

Imagine you invest $1000 in the stock market and the market is growing at 10%. But when you open your brokerage account, you see only 5% growth, and it turns out someone has been pocketing the difference. When you confront this person, they say: don’t be angry, you’re still better off than you were before. You would be right to be angry and you would be right to demand policies that force this person to give you your fair share.

> The worsening of the distribution of wealth is exactly the problem.

That's literally what I said, and why the solution is to undo the things that produced that instead of undoing the things that fueled the aggregated growth while doubling down on the sources of inequality.

Then I agree. But, one of the sources of inequality is labor arbitrage by the capitalist class. Tariffs decrease the utility of that arbitrage.

Tariffs decrease that utility by decreasing the utility of all imports, even the ones that were supporting domestic employment.

It's not 1910 anymore. The US is integrated into the global economy and many if not most jobs export to a global audience. Do you want to hurt the labor arbitrage that allows us to support advanced manufacturing?

You're sure, but virtually no Americans want to work in factories when there are plenty of jobs with either less physical demands or higher pay.

This is a well-known problem with factory jobs: https://fortune.com/2025/04/15/americans-want-factory-jobs-r...

It's not possible because you simply cannot afford to pay manual factory workers a competitive wage AND sell the goods from the factory for competitive prices.

Factory work coming back to America would have to look like car factories do right now: highly automated, highly skilled work that takes full advantage of cheap inputs and advanced technology. It will not be helped by raising the price of inputs, deporting engineers, and defunding research.

Boeing is going to be the first company to feel the pain of Trump’s tariffs.

The govt of India has already put one small order on hold and the word in aviation circles is to switch to Airbus as far as possible.

Military purchases now also won’t happen.

Peter Navarro in one of his rants inadvertently leaked this out on TV: his specific issue was a demand for mandatory tech transfer and manufacturing in India.

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