The age of globalism and unfettered free trade is over, and good riddance.
Isolationism sucks. You have a domestic industry but it's not allowed to sell to other countries in retaliation for you doing the same to them, so it's small and consolidated and when the domestic providers are correspondingly terrible the trade barriers inhibit you from using the foreign ones.
"Free Trade" (but not actually) is even worse, because you take down your own trade barriers nominally in exchange for others doing the same, and then some of them don't. They subsidize their industries so that the global industry consolidates into one country and then if that country sucks you're in even worse shape because it's also a single point of failure and subject to foreign political forces.
What we should be doing isn't going back to trade barriers, it's creating sufficient tax incentives to sustain a domestic industry for strategically important products and then letting other countries do the same and consumers choose which company they want to buy it from. Because then you don't have trade barriers but you do have both domestic production and competition.
The price is that companies in those industries would essentially be paying lower taxes than they currently do or receiving some subsidies in order to make them competitive with the other countries doing something equivalent. But maybe that's not the worst of the three options.
Trade happens because not a single country has or can produce all the (strategically important) products it wants, without trading with others.
The US can internally produce: food staples, fossil fuels and nuclear fuel, most (but not all) industrial chemicals and construction material, defense systems and major military equipment, generic drugs and many medical devices.
However, vulnerabilities exist in: semiconductors, rare earth minerals, speciality chemicals and pharmaceutical raw materials.
Even if the EU were a country, it has high self-sufficiency for: temperature agriculture, industrial chemicals, some aerospace and defense components. However, it is import dependent for: energy, specialty metals and rare earths, pharmaceuticals, high-tech electronics and semiconductors.
Lastly, what about the remaining 167 countries in the world (195 - US - EU)? 90% of the world's population live outside the US and EU.
Trade is really really important for human flourishing.
The US used to produce nearly all of those things and would benefit from having the industrial capacity to process rare earths even if some of the mining happens in Brazil or India or Australia.
> Lastly, what about the remaining 167 countries in the world (195 - US - EU)? 90% of the world's population live outside the US and EU.
They would then have the option to buy any of them from the US, the EU or China instead of having only one of those monopolize global production.
>Trade happens because not a single country has or can produce all the (strategically important) products it wants,
This is an interesting claim. What if instead, a single country could produce all the products it wants and needs, but that doing so would be less lucrative for a certain subset of the population that can take advantage of trade? In such a case, that single country might fail to do so and import a bunch of crap anyway, don't you think?
If you only provide subsidies then consumer prices go down rather than up because the mechanism of operation is for the subsidies to make the domestic supplier more attractive rather than for tariffs to make foreign suppliers less attractive. Meanwhile the subsidy is paid by the government and then the legislators will be trying to keep it down rather than raise it because it reduces the money they have to spend on other things rather than increasing tariffs which do the opposite.
For me consumerism seems much worse than free trade. Buying clothes and use it once, change the car each year or other similar behaviors seem unsustainable because nobody cares about the generated garbage or the energy/material requirements.
Sure, now in some countries we can associate free trade with consumerism, but it's not everywhere the same.
I don't believe in putting the responsibility on individuals. Billions upon billions of whatever currency are being poured into ads, marketing, influencing, lobbying, propaganda (and whatever other manipulation mechanism I'm not thinking of), employing some of the most brilliant mind of this generation, to ensure that individuals are consumerist. Because that's what will make companies the most money, and "making more money" is the only incentive this society has in place.
Show me the incentive and I show you the outcome: the outcome is enormous externalities. We need to fix the incentives, not expect individuals to somehow act against them en masse.
> "making more money" is the only incentive this society has in place
Which society? I lived in 3 different societies (more than a couple of years), and while it is true that money is one of the incentive I think there were fundamental differences that were not obvious about what makes people tick. And by looking at the political situation around the globe - my impression that people care about many more things than their bank account.
That does not mean I propose specific solutions, I am just very skeptical that without free trade things will be better on average for more people than without, if anything is just a red herring so that nobody deals with the more complex issues.
perhaps the US is doing that for other reasons (RFK Jr.) but the good news is that in the post US hegemonic order, that country can go ahead and collapse into flames and the rest of the world won't be taken down with it.
That's rich, coming from a country which outright bands foreign corporations from even operating within their borders, and those who they allow have to operate through a state-controlled corporate minder.
What country do you know Globalnode is coming from? Just interested in the high level of assurance.
on edit: thanks for pointing it out.
China is nothing like your paranoid fantasy.
- Certain industries are restricted or prohibited for foreign investors.
- The “Negative List for Foreign Investment” explicitly bans or limits foreign participation in many areas (e.g., media, education, data services, telecoms, mining). - Some sectors require a Chinese joint venture (you can’t have 100% ownership).
So even though the law allows foreign entry, policy barriers and regulatory discretion make it hard in practice.
To use your example of Volkswagen, their ownership in China is structured around several joint ventures, where it shares ownership with Chinese companies like SAIC Motor, FAW Group, and JAC Group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAIC_Volkswagen
That's a very good for them, by looking at the list. Look at how big a problem the EU now has with its reliance on US tech and military. Sovereignty is very important in strategic industries and in those that allow foreign powers to influence your population.
> of use your example of Volkswagen, their ownership in China is structured around several joint ventures
Volkswagen is a cherry picked example, look at Tesla, which isn't a joint venture. BMW still uses a JV but now holds 75% of BMW Brilliance etc. And it's no longer required for car companies to use joint ventures, that rule was lifted in one of the recent years and more industries were actually opened in the same time.
No cherry picking. Purely random. FWIW, according to my quick research there are only 3 vehicle manufacturers that operate and manufacture in China while retaining 100% ownership as a foreign company. They are Tesla (Gigafactory in Shanghai), Lexus (EV plant in Shanghai), and Scania (truck manuf. in Rugao). If this list is comprehensive, then it is very very short, and my original point stands which is that technically the market might be open (barring the exceptions I mentioned), but in practice it is pretty closed because it is so hard to enter due to all the barriers that are put up.
I think it is fair to say, and I think you would agree, that on a spectrum of free trade, China doesn't rank very high.
BMW example I mentioned is an example of exercising that choice, it lifted its stake in BMW Brilliance from 50% to 75% once the rules changed. And Tesla ias wholly owned in Shanghai (enabled by the 2018 NEV opening). That's precisely the point I made, it wasn't an "exception" as you framed it, to a still binding rule, it was an early use of the liberalization.
So since 2022 ownership is a strategic choice for these companies. Many legacy JVs remain not because they don't have a choice but because of scale, supply chain integration, dealer networks, local partners assets etc, so on other words it works for them like this better, but any OEM with the capital can take majority or go 100% (as BMW did and as Tesla/Scania/Lexus show).
Saying "technically the market might be open ... but in practice it is pretty closed" doesn't hold up to the post 2022 facts.
The capitalist propaganda, "freedom", is so ingrained that we cannot easily paddle back on it. So we will become helplessly hypocritical instead.