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Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

The two American political parties are so perfectly shielded by their own ideological blinders to avoid any possibility of national protectionism against offshoring and outsourcing that I don't think there will ever be any kind of movement against this.

The conservative base is unfriendly to foreigners and foreign cultures, and claims to prefer American-made goods and services, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who causes consumer prices to raise substantially--which they would have to do in order to support American workers creating products rather than our offshored counterparts. And the business owners and shareholders who love to outsource generally aren't true blue voters.

The liberal base is in theory pro-union and pro-worker, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who suggests economic discrimination in favor of native-born industries and workers.

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In my opinion, it's because the two party divide has reached the point of extremism on both sides, and extremists act on emotion rather than logic or reason. Up until a couple of decades ago, they both did a good job of keeping their more extreme members out of sight and mind. Now they're embracing and amplifying them.

It's not extremism. It's plain old American capitalism.

Both parties are being funded by the same people, so both parties play ball with the same set of funders.

Its very obvious, imo they are going to have a hard time signing young men up to fight for this country when they inevitably make everyone so poor they beg anything, even a war.

But...

They'll use profits and greed to alienate the working class further and further, they'll try to get us to go fight wars to capture resources for the KKKapital owners. My prediction is the only war the American people will be willing to sign up to fight, is against those same KKKapital owners.

Probably explains why they love bunkers so much, for the case where this whole experiment backfires on them.

“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.” ― Ulysses S. Grant

Conspiracist nonsense. Like, this could hypothetically explain a few things for a few industries where both parties somewhat align, but in general this is populist slop.

> The conservative base is unfriendly to foreigners and foreign cultures, and claims to prefer American-made goods and services, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who causes consumer prices to raise substantially--which they would have to do in order to support American workers creating products rather than our offshored counterparts.

Currently, the head of the party is raising and lowering tariffs at will, so I don't quite think this holds anymore.

He is able to do so only to the extent that he can convince them that prices aren't rising, or he's not causing it.

He's able to do that.

For now. It remains to be seen how long it will last.

It's been over a decade. He's been impeached twice, lost an election once - and it sounds like the lesson he took from that is "get rid of elections" - been convicted on thirty-four felony counts, charged with even more, mismanaged a pandemic, "shot at", wiped his ass with a number of strategic alliances, sent thugs out on America's streets to harass people for being Latino, and been linked to a cabal of child-trafficking sex offenders.

A few hundred bucks a year ain't gonna move the needle at this point.

Agree. It is harder to manufacture in America when the party leader breaks critical parts of your supply chain with rapid and unpredictable tariff changes. It is impossible to lower consumer prices on a good by raising taxes on it.

This is not even mentioning the astounding corruption of a president and his family personally and directly benefiting from these tariffs threats.

Does the party not understand the realities of this? Do they understand and are just lying about it because they're afraid of the leader? Afraid of admitting that they're wrong? I believe people are usually rational but I do not understand a rationalization where choosing to harm American manufacturers and consumers on the whims of a visibly corrupt leader is good, actually.

I think there are a lot of people who recognize these changes as not very durable and don't see an immediate political benefit to opposing them right now.

Why wouldn't these changes be durable?

We're a product of a very, very strange time and place in history where the average person had at least some recourse against tyrants. From prehistory to about the mid-point of the 20th century, if you were alive on planet Earth, there's a near guarantee that you lived life basically as a possession of some person or family who controlled where you lived, where you could go, what clothes you wore, what work you could do, whether or not you would be educated, who you would marry, if you would have children, which god (if any) you could worship, what you could say, and even whether you lived or died.

That was your existence.

This whole thing where you have some control over your destiny? That's the fragile set of changes. Someone behaving like Trump is historically insanely durable.

Can you clarify what you mean by "not very durable?"

US presidency is very short

They're assuming normalcy will return after the senile tenant-from-hell is either evicted from his taxpayer-provided housing or just keels over, ignoring that the senile guy writes angry screeds about how he's not going anywhere and was put and is kept there by a whole conspiracy of enablers.

I really find the state of American (but not only) politics dreadful where everything is seen under the lenses of conservatives vs liberals.

Most people I know, everywhere in the world have mixed views on most topics.

Let alone the fact that ideologies tend to change, modern rights are way more populist and economically-socialist than they were 2 decades ago. See Poland, Hungary, Italy, etc, where governments make money fall on the poorest, on the elderly, etc ignoring their historical electorate (middle class).

People one-on-one have heterodox views, no one likes to think they just take it all wholesale from some amorphous ideology without a leader.

If I could filter "conservatives are X and liberals are Y and it makes no sense" type thought, I would, because it's a driver of this impression.

I agree, but the fact of the matter is that for voting purposes there are two "teams" in the US, and they vote and argue in public down pretty well-defined ideological lines. If you know the two or three most strongly-held moral-political beliefs of an American, it's highly likely that you can guess another 150 sociopolitical beliefs they at least profess to hold to their friends.

You must understand, we're only allowed to vote for good cop or bad cop over here.

Bad cop and much much much worse cop. And somehow the latter got elected.

liberal base is in theory pro-union and pro-worker, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who suggests economic discrimination in favor of native-born industries and workers.

Well, yes, because discrimination on the basis of where someone was born is illegal. The American liberal base is, and has always been, fine with economic discrimination in favor of those in America (without regard to where they were born or their residency status).

There is a stereotype that conservatives are "less fine" with outsourcing than liberals. I'm not saying it's strictly true, but it's a very strongly embedded stereotype if it's not true.

Also, you're resigning the biggest part of the conversation (immigration and residency policy and enforcement, especially with regards to employment) to an implication in a parenthetical?

Protectionism may work in some cases, but even when it works, it works by making things more expensive. People don't buy American cars because it's cheaper to make similar cars in Mexico. Fine, so let's force companies to make cars in America. It's now more expensive (otherwise we won't be importing from Mexico in the first place).

You add more and more protectionism, it may get some jobs back, but the price is that things get more and more expensive. And not by a few percent, more like by 50% or more. (Just think of how much money an American worker needs to have an ordinary middle-class life compared to a Mexican worker.)

Now consider how much people were angry over the Covid-era inflation and how it was a major factor in Trump coming back (and looks like it's going to be a major factor in Republicans losing the mid-term election this year). Nobody wants prices to go up. Americans say they want protectionism but what they want is a fairy tale protectionism where jobs comes back but prices magically stay stable. It cannot happen, and if the choice is between some other group of Americans in Michigan getting better jobs and you getting your SUV at a "reasonable" price, people will choose the latter. (I'm not digging at Americans - the same is going to happen everywhere.)

It's basically "It's extremely hard to defeat capitalism at its own game." Nobody likes capitalism, but that doesn't mean you'll get popular by defying capitalism.

I think you need to look at the data before making assertions like this.

> People don't buy American cars

53% of cars sold in the US are assembled in the US versus 18% assembled in Mexico.

> things get more and more expensive. And not by a few percent, more like by 50% or more.

The total cost of manufacturing wages only account for 5-15% of the MSRP of a vehicle. So moving manufacturing from an expensive country to a cheap country only changes the price by maybe 10% due to the impact of wages.

I think all of your points are valid and I can't really see any part if your argument that isn't at least directionally correct. But then I'm left wondering:

Why is protectionism working for China?

Okay, I'm really talking out of my ass, but my very uninformed take is:

Protectionism is "working" for China because it's still a poor country, it was much poorer only a generation ago, and when you have no industry, it's easier to deliberately keep people poor for a little longer in exchange for more jobs. Once the pipeline is built, it's just societal inertia.

But I have to wonder how much it working out for China is just "China is still poor, so people have little choice." Among millions of Americans decrying outsourcing of American jobs, how many are willing to work under an average labor condition of China if they were given the opportunity?

That's a critical question that isn't being asked enough.

Americans aren't allowed to compete like that; there are too many labor and environmental protections in place to experience "Chinese working conditions" even if they wanted to. We legally can't work Chinese hours or affect the environment like the Chinese.

So while it's true that Americans aren't really willing to work hard enough to compete on price with the Chinese, it's also literally impossible.

And many outsourced jobs are like this. Americans can't compete because it's illegal to compete. Our hands are tied. We can't bend the local laws to make life cheaper for ourselves, and most of our products are sold to us by people who can and do.

I would be curious what would happen if in order to sell to American workers, you had to meet American environmental and labor conditions. I think that's a total non-starter, but it's a hypothetical that may cause the ponderer to address the huge gap in how competitive other countries are allowed to be to sell to Americans, vs. how Americans aren't really allowed to compete with them.

> I would be curious what would happen if in order to sell to American workers, you had to meet American environmental and labor conditions. I think that's a total non-starter, but it's a hypothetical that may cause the ponderer to address the huge gap in how competitive other countries are allowed to be to sell to Americans, vs. how Americans aren't really allowed to compete with them.

This plus capital controls would reduce a lot of economic inequality between countries. It would be super, super rough in the short-term but probably globally beneficial in the long term. I believe Bernie Sanders was proposing this back in 2016.

Well, of course, I agree with you. That's why I said I don't think it would happen.

I personally wouldn't mind a world where consumer goods were much, much more expensive and difficult to acquire, even though it would mean that my life would feel harder and less wealthy than it does now.

What I don't understand is whether or not there's any path to take besides watching the country gently sail along the sunset path into oblivion. Is that it? We gave away the keys to the country's wealth generation mechanism, and now we're at the mercy of the global economy to do whatever it wants? I don't want to compete with foreign firms who can hire foreign labor to compete with me and sell on my territory, but do I simply have no choice?

That's very nice but to people middle class and lower, it's not about paying a higher price, it's being able to buy what is needed to live at all. I still don't see what is wrong with capitalism. It did show that many self proclaimed advocates of capitalism were liars and changed to hardcore communist economics and became sore losers when they felt "someone else" is "winning".

What are you talking about? I haven't said anything against capitalism. If anything, the problem with the current scenario is that there's not _enough_ capitalism.

How do you propose to compete with foreign workers when the government prevents you from matching their employment conditions within your own company?

You said you'd be happier with much more expensive goods which is what happens with protectionism and were sad to compete with foreign goods.

I'd be fine with either:

- The massive regulatory burdens on American businesses are dissolved in order to permit genuine competition with the globe

- Economic protectionism is applied so that the heavily regulated American business can compete on price with less-regulated foreign businesses

In both cases, the prices of goods would increase--in the first case, less than the second. But both would be better than the current status quo, in my opinion.

I don't want to live in a country where I have to pay American prices for goods and services, but the owner class only has to pay foreign prices for labor and supply. I have no desire to be outcompeted by foreigners while my hands are tied by local laws.

Things may get more expensive, but if more Americans can live a middle class life even accounting for the inflation of consumer goods I think that is a good tradeoff.

What happens when you remove the velocity of money from the economy and replace it with companies that count on their employees receiving government assistance in order to be able to live? Are things actually cheaper for the average worker long term in our current scenario? Or is it a temporary affordability in exchange for a worse economic future? It seems like things still have to keep getting worse and worse to be financially viable in our current cycle (clothes are Kleenex quality like sci-fi books joked would be issued in a UBI future, enshitification is in everything).

When a system takes the money from the economy and delivers it to the capital class and foreign workers, what happens to that economy? We don't know. We're gambling it will somehow be ok. We are also losing the 50% of taxes that comes from individual workers, so add in losing that velocity of money vector going through the government as well.

It doesn't seem like a sustainable system, nor a cheaper system. Only a very risky short term gamble.

Yeah I’m sure the savings will be passed onto the consumer, genius

Savings are literally being passed onto the consumers. The #1 reason people buy imported goods is that they are cheaper: if they're the same price as domestic goods then there will be little incentive to buy imported goods and domestic jobs won't be going away.

In other words, the only reason foreign industry threatens domestic jobs is because it's cheaper to produce the same thing in these countries and the cost savings are being passed on to domestic consumers.

Sometimes I wonder if we're simply living in different realities. You may claim it's not worth it, but you can't claim it's not happening. Just go to grocery and see the prices of Mexican avocados and everything.

If you think that software isn't meaningfully different than avocados then maybe we are living in different realities.

Excellent analysis.

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