Comment by throwaway729 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway729 | Hacker News Reader

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The US has plenty of resources, space, and people to produce all three of those at home.

Eventually. Not immediately. Factories and supply chains and aren't built over night.

The US would take a hard look at what it really needs as a people

Or, much more likely, its people would flood the streets in anger and demand a return to normalcy.

In the mean time, black markets and therefore crime would explode.

Huge swaths of the economy, depending on Chinese imports in their supply chain, would cease to function. Unemployment would surge, throwing even more angry bodies onto the streets and even more desperate bellies into the Jail cells.

Fringe political movements would capitalize and the US would face an existential threat to its democratic heritage.

Skilled workers and those with large amounts of capital would quietly leave for greener pastures in the EU and stable parts of South America and Asia, making recovery that much more difficult.

At least, that's what typically happens when trade wars create extreme shortages of key goods and services (we have a lot of data points on this). Perhaps the USA is exceptional, but I wouldn't count on it...

> Factories and supply chains and aren't built over night.

The US also has multiple trade partners around the world. China does not hold a monopoly on US imports. If anything, it's more of a final assembly point for many things, and the US could do more business with southeast Asia.

On top of that, the usual workings of supply and demand would make it quite profitable to divert $STUFF from another economy to the US. Heck, if China still traded any goods the rest of the world at all, firms in the rest of the world could just sell us back many of the exact same goods, with a competitive markup for the indirection, unless and until China puts a complete stranglehold on all its trading partners' deals with the US.

It'd be bad, but at worst it'd be more like 2008 bad than 1930s bad. People did "flood the streets" a little back then, of course (our friends at Occupy Wall Street). It was pretty easy to ignore, though.

Now, if we want to talk of the disruptions associated with an outright war, that's another matter, but we'll also have to worry about the war, which will likely be far worse.

This all is potential, but also seems to be based purely on your own opinion. Are you referencing a scenario that already happened in a different country?

Yes. Two give the two most relevant and potent examples:

ABCD in Japan prior to ww2.

Chile prior to Pinochet. Chile is agriculturally rich but suffered food shortages none the less.

Neither is exactly this scenario but there are enough similarities to suggest likely outcomes. People don't typically "toughen up and deal with" severe and abrupt changes to availability of common household items, and even countries with the potential for self sufficiency often have painful transitional periods.

In many of our lifetimes, see the Oil crisis in the 1970s when the ME embargoed the west. Go read up on that, it worked out well for the west and bad for the ME. People were pissed about having to wait in line for gas...for awhile...and carter lost re-election, but there were no angry people in the streets.

So ya, we do toughen up, and no, china doesn't have much leverage over the west at all, even less than the Middle East.

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